How do you get into studying the female orgasm?
Let's just dive straight in. Okay, so my background was I was a schoolteacher for 20 years, and I was interested in psychology and maths.
That's what I taught. About 20 years ago, I came across a really interesting book by a woman called Elizabeth Lloyd.
It was a bias in the science of evolution.
I was on holiday in Thailand. I read it.
The book told me that female orgasm did nothing, had no function.
And to say I was surprised would be an understatement.
And I got interested. And I started studying evolutionary biology.
And I approached some prominent figures in the field and said, you seem to have an issue here studying this subject.
And it just sort of I'm obviously quite a nerdy kind of character.
I delve into these things. I read the original stuff.
And once I started reading the original stuff, it became obvious that there were two very distinct traditions of studying human sexuality, particularly female orgasm.
One of them went down this strange route of saying it did nothing.
And another one, which had been somewhat sidelined, suggested that she had some really interesting functions.
What was your intuition? What was it that you thought early on, huh, this seems to be a fruitful area to research more into?
It became obvious from a fairly early stage that a number of the people who were opining about female orgasm were not studying sex at all. not in any kind of sense of actually being in the room with other people having sex.
That's why I start off the book by talking about animals in zoos and mating in captivity, because what was being studied in laboratories just felt a lot like studying mating in captivity, and that doesn't capture the range of what humans are up to or interested in.
It doesn't capture the range of what other animals are interested in.
It makes them interesting either, to be honest.
I mean, it's That's why I start off the book talking about COVID and the fact that I live next to Fota, which is a terrific wildlife park, and I recommend it highly.
And we have the breeding group of a number of animals, giraffes, cheetahs.
We've got some new tigers there. What else have we got?
Lions. And they've all had babies. And one of the reasons they have babies is because they have privacy.
They can hide away from humans when they don't want to play with us and do want to play with each other. what does sex research in the lab look like when it's done well, when it's done badly?
What are the mechanisms of how you do this?
Well, I'm not going to reject all lab-based research, but one of the primary platforms on which a lot of sex research is based is, listeners will probably have heard of Masters and Johnson because there was a TV series about them.
I think it was called Masters of Sex a few years back, and they are the famous sex researchers from the 60s.
And the essence of their research into female orgasm was to get half a dozen women to get them to masturbate to orgasm in a lab.
And they inserted a glass tube, which they called Ulysses, inside which had a camera.
And they measured the results. And genuinely, that was the platform on which they based the whole idea that female orgasm didn't really have any function.
Right. I wouldn't say it was done badly, but I would just say that it wasn't the final word.
Okay, and what does better sex research or female orgasm research in a lab look like?
Well, at the same time Marston Johnson were doing their stuff in labs, there was a team in England, the Foxes, who were both doctors.
They were married, and they were having sex in their own marital bedroom.
And the... very intrepid kind of pioneers and heroes of the field.
So Dr. Fox's missus inserted a telemetry device and a pressure change device inside herself and had sex with her husband on the marital bed and then measured the pressure changes.
Okay, that sounds like, yeah, pioneering work.
Yes. And they found some very interesting, I mean, I'm just giving one example of the work that was done.
But it was, they found something that Masters and Johnson didn't, which was that female orgasm is associated.
I mean, they studied oxytocin action and they studied pressure, uterine, intrauterine pressure changes.
And that provides a mechanism for orgasm to increase fertility.
So in many ways, they were sort of the foundation of the thread that we picked up 50 years later.
There are other people in that thread. It's not just sort of me and our team in the Foxes.
There's a huge team in Central Europe led by a guy called Ludwig Wilt, who did a whole load of stuff on oxytocin throughout the late 80s and 90s as well.
And they sort of amplified this research.
What do most people get wrong when it comes to understanding female orgasm?
Oh, blimey. Well, I think because it's comparatively difficult to bring about, there has to be something wrong either with women or with nature in general or with – no, actually, no, those are the two dominant fields.
So rather than thinking that women are picky and choosy in other fields and you could apply that principle to their orgasmic response, they sort of go, well, either women are sort of psychologically broken, which is basically Freud's theory,
Or that they're just badly designed by a capricious nature, which is the byproduct theory.
Go a little deeper on the byproduct theory for me.
Okay, so starting off in the 1970s with a pioneer called Simons.
He wrote a book called The Evolution of Human Sexuality.
Back in the 70s, the full structure and nature of the clitoris, you might have been mistaken for thinking that it was as he described it, which was something a bit like a male nipple, i.e. sort of small, functionless, external, and not particularly interesting.
Now, actually, if you delved even into...
The specialist research at the time, I mean, that story would not have got off the ground because actually there were people who knew that wasn't true.
But it was possible to believe that in the 1970s.
By the time we got to the 1990s, it really wasn't possible to believe that.
However, the idea has sort of taken root that the main area of sensitivity in women was external.
And then therefore it was plausible, for example, that it was almost impossible to generate orgasm through normal penetrative intercourse.
And the idea behind it was, and Steve Gould, I mean, part of this was publicized by Steve Gould, who was an extremely famous and popular paleontologist.
And because he was considered to be a big supporter of evolutionary theory, and particularly in the States where evolution is sort of massively politicized and it also became a religious thing, the fact that he was a supporter of evolution meant that people were willing to elide over the fact that he was politically very opposed to the applying of evolutionary theory to human beings.
I mean, to put it bluntly, he thought that if human beings started applying evolutionary theory to themselves, they'd all turn into fascists.
So the important thing to do was to stop them doing... And this isn't me saying this.
I mean, his... His Evolution for the People group sort of pretty much said that.
And he championed this idea that female orgasm was a byproduct.
And Elizabeth Lloyd was his sort of protege and colleague.
And so her book was the one I read. That was the one that started me off.
Is this similar to sort of looking at it like a spandrel of some kind?
Yes, yes, the whole spandrel thing, yeah.
That's a very good example of Gould's kind of thinking on this.
I mean, you know they're not called spandrels.
In fact, this would be typical of Steve Gould.
His famous paper is called The Spandrels of St.
Marcos, and it's this idea that these ornate structures weren't actually integral to the structure of the cathedral.
They're just byproducts. But actually, the structures in question aren't even called spandrels.
They're called pendatives. And in fact, they are integral to the structure.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Right. OK, so I'm wrong twice.
No, no, no. You're not wrong at all. You're accurately reporting what the literature says.
It's just that Steve Gould is just notorious for this.
He will he will sort of drop these things into and then people will sort of pick it up and they'll they'll go around and they'll they'll say things like, oh, well, you know, these these things are just spandrels or all these things.
I mean, one of his favorites is just those stories.
And he's done huge amounts of damage in the in the literature because people just sort of dismiss adaptive adaptationist ideas.
And they think that they've got Steve Gould backing for doing so. oh yeah we are talking the same language here um okay so to to recap show you briefly why steve why steve is steve gould is wrong i've just taken a carry so this this this here is a clitoris um and i can't remember whether i said that's not that's not that's not a clitoris that's a pokemon well this is this is a this is a life-size clitoris and i've been giving these away with the book um And because, I mean, I've got chapters in the book that are obviously devoted to looking at the nature and structure and form and function, all the rest of it.
But there is nothing quite so dramatic as just sort of going, clitoris isn't what you think it is.
You think it's something like a male nipple, you know, and it isn't.
Look at the size of it. It's about four inches long.
Most of it is internal. It's got ducts. It's multiply innervated.
It's got its own somatosensory cortex associated with it in the brain.
And none of those things are true of male nipples.
Is it correct to say that the clitoris is the only part of the human body which is exclusively designed for pleasure?
No, I don't think so. I wouldn't say it is just exclusively designed for pleasure.
I think it's not accidentally designed for pleasure.
But pleasure always does a job, doesn't it?
If something is pleasant for humans, Dan Dennett does a nice talk on this on a TED talk a couple of years back.
So what's it called? Sweet, cute, sexy, funny, I think is the name of the talk.
The order might be different. And his point, which I think is a very good one, is that if nature needs you to do a job, which would otherwise be a chore, then it makes it pleasurable or it makes it, you know, there is a dose of pleasure.
Right. Maybe I should have reworded what I said.
The proximate reason for the clitoris is pleasure.
And are you aware of any other areas of the human body where the proximate reason for their existence is also just pleasure? um so that's an interesting question uh i would i think you're almost certainly right insofar as it's got the the highest concentration of of nerve endings associated with pleasure um so um women are lucky that way and there is this there is this old story isn't there that they did the um guy tarizias who was the the prophet apparently uh the reason he was made blind by the gods was because because he'd been a man and a woman various times And somebody asked him, so give us a $64,000 questionnaire.
Who has the most fun during sex? And he went, oh, women, easily.
And so they blinded him. Of course, you're not allowed to say that in public if you're a Greek prophet.
Interestingly, I remember listening to a podcast talking about either men who transitioned or women who transitioned.
And the difference in the experience of orgasm when they had different hormonal profiles.
And the... I think it was female to male.
And the difference being much more local.
Well, actually, you can tell me. Have you looked at this?
Is this something... It's not, I mean, I don't, I hang around people who do a lot of that kind of research.
I don't do it directly. But the glands of the clitoris, so the bit that a lot of people are talking about is, so if you imagine sort of, The walls of the lips of the vulva are sort of around there.
The bit that's visible is what people think of as the clitoris, and it's the glands of the clitoris, and that's where the bulk of the nerve endings are.
And that's a bit which you want to keep if you're doing vaginoplasty.
You want to make sure that that stays around because otherwise – or if you're doing phalloplasty, that's where a lot of the nerve endings are.
Okay. Yeah. So if Freud, women are psychologically broken, that's another thing.
If we're saying it's not a spandrel, that it's not some byproduct like male nipples, how is the female orgasm adaptive?
Can you make the case for the other side of this argument?
Sure. I think one of the difficulties is that if you ask women about their orgasms, quite often they'll say, well, which ones do you mean?
So just park that for a second because their experiences are more multifaceted than the male ones.
But parking that for a moment, the common thread that runs through pretty much all of this is oxytocin-mediated peristalsis.
And the thing that's kind of interesting about that is… What's peristalsis?
So peristalsis is the pulsing which creates pressure changes.
And administering oxytocin artificially, which is what the VILT team did in the 90s, will create those pressure changes and they'll create movement in the oviduct.
But orgasm creates a big flow of oxytocin.
It has the same effect. We've known about this in humans for 50 years.
That was the basis of the Fox studies. And we've known about it in animal models going back nearly 100 years.
Particularly, there's German research going back into the late 20s, early 30s, looking at rapid sperm transport in rats, dogs. rabbits, and then animals that are important for agriculture, like sheep and pigs and cattle and horses.
Now, we don't know what those animals are experiencing, and that's the advantage of being a human ethologist, is you can go up and you can sort of go to your human participants, do you feel, and you've got a big long list of things that we know oxytocin does, like it makes you feel floaty, it gives you a sense of trust, it creates breath apnea,
And you can ask, say, they can tick these things off and go, yep, I get that.
Yep, I get that. You can't ask that of dogs and horses, but you can still measure the oxytocin levels.
Does that answer the question or am I going around it obliquely?
No, not at all. I think It increases oxytocin levels, but when most people think about oxytocin, we're thinking about pair bonding.
We're thinking about sort of lovey-dovey sense of buy-in.
We're thinking about, well, you know, we need to stick together if we're going to eventually have kids, and I need to be invested in you, and I need to see you not as a stranger but as kin.
But you're talking about other stuff. You're not just talking about pair bonding's effects of oxytocin.
So what else is it doing? Yeah. It's even more basic than that.
It looks like, and this is going back phylogenetically, it looks like the origin of oxytocin is milk production.
So it's the basic mammalian hormone. And the thing that it seems to have been primarily associated with is producing milk, so that we are mammals.
It has these other functions as well. And as the milk production started coexisting with the other features of being mammals, like, for example, having altricial young.
Not all mammals have altricial young, but some of them do.
So they need a lot of care. so they i mean they need to hang around i'm sorry all mammals need to hang around the mother a bit because they're um they're being mammals they're suckling milk but some of them need a lot more care than others and human babies need the most care of all and creating a bond between the uh the mother and the baby is is another uh function of oxytocin and it looks like nature is just lazy and it's well we can we can we can do this with uh with with mothers and offspring this is one of the there's one of the things that's interesting about freud freud sort of thought that Males would be shocked if they realized that the nurturing instincts, the sex instincts were being turned into nurturing instincts.
And like a lot of things with Freud, I think he got it precisely the wrong way around.
The primary instinct was bonding with offspring.
And some of that is just sort of overspilled into going, oh, it's probably nice to keep a guy around as well.
Right. So what is happening mechanically that is adaptive with regards to female orgasm?
Presumably it's doing something to do with likelihood of conception or something else.
Before we even get into the interpretation, the sort of like social relational aspects of this, what like mechanically, how does it help or hinder?
So the uterine peristalsis creates pressure changes.
And you can actually measure the movement of sperm-like product.
Now, this is where it becomes difficult, of course, to do this in laboratories.
So we sort of have to measure these things in various different ways.
The FOX team actually measured the pressure changes directly while they were having sex.
And then they also measured similar effects by just administering oxytocin.
Vilt's team expanded this out, and I think eventually they ended up measuring certainly 100, it might have been even twice that, women with large oxytocin doses and then introducing sperm-like material.
And then we came around in 2016 and came up with a way of measuring backflow.
So there's a phenomenon called backflow. which is up to an hour after sex, the vagina will eject material from the reproductive tract.
And you can measure the amount that's come out.
Now, will people know what a moon cup is?
It's a device that you can use for collecting period fluid.
If you don't want to insert things. Now, if we just produced a method for injecting something that was like a sperm-like material, putting in a moon cup and then creating a deep orgasm inside the woman in question and then measuring up to an hour later what came out.
15% to 20% less comes out if she's had an orgasm.
Right. Is the timing important? I have to assume that if you've got the fluid in and then the orgasm happens, that that's more effective than the other way around.
But... that I'm going to guess on average is less likely to happen, given that once the man's done, he's done.
It's very difficult to measure. We need to come up with a method of injecting a known amount inside.
And of course, men will vary in the amount they're producing.
So you can't tell how much is coming out unless you've controlled what's going in.
And if you're doing that, then obviously you're moving away from actual intercourse.
So like, like a lot of these things, you, it's extremely difficult to produce one study that just sort of, I mean, in terms of timing though, I mean, in terms of if, if, if what you're saying is that there is this, um, change in pressure, which it seems like sort of sucks semen up towards where, where it needs to go in sort of simple people language.
Um, If that is created by orgasm or if that's more prevalent when orgasm is reached than when it's not, then I have to assume that it means you need the substance in there and then for female orgasm to occur for that to happen.
But that's not the way around that sex works.
Oh, I see. Yeah. Right. Yes. No, I see what you're saying.
Yeah, it looks like the orgasm is one thing and the movement of material is another.
So there is quite possibly an initial movement along with the orgasm.
But once orgasm is happening, once oxytocin levels are raised, then it looks like those pressure changes are actually persist for quite a while.
And it's not just the bit where you're feeling pleasure that in-suck is happening.
Although I would hazard a guess that it's heightened at that moment, but we've not measured that bit directly.
And I think that it was precisely that that got Baker and Bellis confused in the 90s, because I think they thought that women were timing their orgasm and the orgasm itself was creating in-suck. and that they were then generating sperm wars.
Have you come across this research? Is this like sperm competition?
Yes, sort of the direct sperm competition.
And this is the stuff that hasn't been replicated.
My suspicion is that what they were looking for was something where the orgasm just caused more or less an instant hit.
So you would have to have sperm from rivals in there at sort of the same kind of time and have a sperm war between them.
And it was all exciting and dramatic stuff, but it's defied replication, I'm afraid.
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Okay. You said different categories of female orgasm.
What are you talking about there? Right.
So when we first started off doing this, we just sort of really just opened it up to ask women, what should scientists be asking them?
And a significant number, not all, but a significant number said, well, that's a dumb question.
Which ones do you mean? And we said, well, you tell us which ones you mean.
And they come up with various kinds of descriptors of location, intensity, and associated feelings.
And so that was just sort of qualitative stuff just to get us off thinking about it.
And so we then created a questionnaire which asked people, we're very, very careful because there's been this big history of separating orgasms into clitoral and vaginal.
And that sort of goes back to Freud and other people as well.
And it has a lot of history behind it. And it's also what Masters and Johnson were trying to overturn.
So we're very, very careful to stay away from those things for a whole bunch of reasons, partly the history.
And also because, as I was just showing with the clitoris, the clitoris is the seat of orgasm, but it's quite a large organ.
And all orgasms, all female orgasms seem to evolve the clitoris in some way.
So we wanted to keep away from all of that.
But when we just asked women to describe their orgasms with quite a complicated questionnaire and then analyze them, they did seem to fall into two fairly distinct categories.
Ones that were very, very broadly, ones were experienced on the surface, which tended to be more intense, and ones that were experienced deep inside, which seemed to have more of the oxytocin elements.
Although I have to stress, we weren't measuring oxytocin directly.
We're measuring plausible concomitants of oxytocin, like the breath apnea, the floaty feelings, feelings of trust and all the rest of it.
And it looks like the ones that are associated with penetration and deep inside have more of those kinds of things associated with them.
However, we didn't want to sort of separate them into these are better than others.
And certainly the women themselves didn't.
Um, there's no, there are some sort of neo Freudian scholars who want to sort of argue that, uh, like Freud did that certain orgasms are more mature than others and, uh, or mentally healthier than others.
And we weren't going down that route. Right.
I guess the obvious link here is that the deeper orgasm with the more oxytocin results in the peristalsis, results in the pressure changes because the deeper orgasm is brought on by something being in there and that something has maybe got some sperm that's coming out the end of it.
And the surface orgasm is maybe just you on your own or something else.
So you don't need that level of oxytocin.
Is that the theory? Yeah. Something like that, yeah.
I mean, although I would have to be honest and say we're going beyond – I'm speculating somewhat because we haven't measured the oxytocin levels.
But it looks like – and also, I mean, that would also help explain why we don't need to decide between whether it's a mate choice or a side choice thing.
It could be doing both. And it certainly seems to be the case that if you find cultures where –
For example, the man giants in Polynesia, who were sort of people that Simons was talking about, but I think he was trying to impose a model on a group where it didn't fit.
The women in those cultures are very much in charge of the sexuality, and the young men in those cultures are not allowed to have sex with the young girls of their own age until they prove themselves on the older women.
And quite a lot of that involves them having to make sure that the older women have several orgasms before a penis goes anywhere near them.
So it looks like, uh, when women are calling the shots, they are very happy to have, you know, whichever orgasms and they, they may well all contribute to fertility in some way.
What are the biggest predictors of female orgasm?
Oh, um, the, the, the biggest one we found, uh, was attractive partner smell, which, um, we, we found really interesting because that was, that was, uh, when we went from the sort of describe your orgasm types to us to, well, describe your partners to us.
One of the first things that they said we should ask about was partner smell.
And it turned out to be the, I mean, none of these are huge effect sizes, but that's because the sort of data you collect with these things tends to be quite muddy.
But it was the largest effect size. And that's interesting because it suggests that the biggest predictor is something to do with genetic compatibility, because that's how we're advertising our genetic compatibility to each other with smell.
Okay. What else? What are some of the other predictors? uh, dominance, uh, sexual dominance, um, and also at the same time considerateness.
So those, those things might seem to be pulling in opposite directions, but I, I actually don't think they are for a, for a bunch of interesting reasons.
We also, we also asked a raft of the sort of the usual bunch of questions that evolutionists ask about things like muscularity and, um, uh, that kind of stuff.
And none of that, none of that came out.
So, uh, it looks like people want somebody who is, um, a uh sexually dominant but not uh but but also considerate um nice smelling partner who pays close attention and provides deep penetration those those would be those would be the big four okay where does attraction come into this where does the level of attraction come into this um i i i Yes, it's an interesting one, isn't it?
I suppose it depends on how you're going to decompose desire.
If you're going to break it down into just sort of whether a guy is good looking or not, we haven't actually found anything that's a predictor there.
But there's so many confounds in there because women are often not going to go to bed with someone they don't find desirable in the first place.
So we need to be able to make, we need to be able to discriminate between the various guys that the women are talking about.
That was what was interesting in the 2012 study we did is because we were asking women explicitly to make comparisons between different sexual encounters because we're asking them to describe different orgasms.
And I'd like to follow that up with a bunch of other measures because there are some sort of fairly obvious things that make males attractive. that as far as we know so far, aren't predictive of orgasm.
So, I mean, I haven't done this research myself, but Dan Nettle, and I've just forgotten the guy's name.
He's a student at the time, Tom. It'll come back to me.
They looked at things like finance, and that didn't seem to have an effect.
I think some people have looked at height, and that doesn't seem to have had an effect.
They're the kind of things you think might, because you might think, well, these would spark off certain triggers saying, you know, high status, prestige, all of that kind of stuff.
And I'm not for a second saying that they aren't there to be measured, but we haven't measured them in such a way yet that they've come out as being predictive.
I suppose it's interesting because trying to get a representative sample of men having sex with women would require women to get rid of their filter for which men they want to have sex with.
It's like, no, no, no, no, you must have sex with one from each category.
It's like, no, I've already pre-selected So when you try and control for other things, it's pretty difficult.
Yes. Um, I mean, and it's one of the reasons why we, you know, we, we, we have to use, um, data, which are not necessarily the, the, the most, um, most rare, but we can't do randomized control trials here.
Um, alas, um, uh, and, um, And if we could, the ethics teams wouldn't let us.
I'm pretty confident of that. Getting in the way again.
How much of female desire of men is driven by other females' desire of those same men, do you think?
Yes, considerable. I mean, there are female groupies, there are male groupies, and there's good reasons for that.
The crisis of female rock stars. well right yes no you i mean you you you you know all about this stuff you know the the whole fisherian sexy sun stuff uh women need to cue off one another because what counts as being success in the local environment is not always immediately obvious whereas what counts as being fertile in the local environment is is obvious men men have a baseline you know what they find attractive um and and uh i mean women might do as well but It's a considerably different one.
I mean, the number of men who can just get away with being beautiful, well, we know their names.
They're the ones who can be on telly being models and being film stars or the rest of it.
The rest of us have to have some other kinds of qualities.
Not learn to play the guitar or do poetry.
That's the kind of thing, yes. And there's a reason why those groupies get all excited, because it makes sense.
If the local peacock is just slightly more pretty because his feathers are slightly brighter, then he might have sons whose feathers are also brighter.
And so it makes sense for them to cue off each other, which they seem to.
Sexy son hypothesis is so fascinating to me, and it makes an awful lot of sense.
I remember seeing some fascinating research around the attitudes of... women to casual sex based on whether they had sons or daughters.
So interesting to me, like that, I guess, uh, like ecological component of, of, of how we show up, of how our, um, programming can be adapted to the local environment.
Um, okay. So one of the reasons I think a lot of the time that we, we, we men are blind to female, female competition, um, because there's a real, I mean, the, the, the, the, the mere existence of a sexy science hypothesis immediately means that there's going to be attention, doesn't that?
Because, uh, the women are going to be one sexiest son creator out there.
And then if you don't get him, then that means you need to get, I mean, I suppose, you know, going back to the groupies thing, uh, The idea of lots of other men competing for the same woman as you is very different to the idea of other women competing for the same man that you're after.
I guess in the same way that men like to go to the gym in order to get bigger muscles...
The kind of male-male competition is inherently exciting, but I don't, you're totally right.
Like, I don't know. And I suppose the other issue that you have is because women are so much more choosy, the pool, the groupie pool that you're pulling from as a woman of high, I mean, like, what do you even, what's the level of attractiveness?
Like, status, the guys don't care about your status.
Comparatively, you know, I'm speaking in very broad strokes here.
Yeah. They don't care about your ability to acquire resources.
They don't care that much about your level of competence beyond being smart, being nice, being caring, being funny, conscientious, like stuff that people that have done a bit of work will have an understanding of.
But for the most part, the most talented woman on the planet is competing with a 21-year-old barista from Starbucks.
Right. Uh, and it's, I guess in some ways, kind of a, a much more vicious hierarchy.
And then in other ways, men's hierarchy is much more vicious as well, because it's much more sort of winner takes all.
But yeah, you're so, I mean, female intersexual competition for me, I spent basically probably half of 2023 just obsessing over intersexual competition, especially among women.
You had Benenson on your show, didn't you?
Chris Benenson's been on. Christina Durante's been on.
Sarah Hill's been on. Corey Clark came on.
You know, I've done the rounds, so to speak.
All first-rate scientists. These are terrific people to have on.
Because I think men often need... We need our eyes open to this.
Because otherwise, we just miss stuff. Well, we do, but...
Look, I think it's fascinating to observe the kind of very fine scalpel that women use.
The way, like venting. Have you looked at venting much?
Nope. Oh, sit down. Tell me about venting.
Let me spin you a yarn. So venting is a really unique type of gossip. venting is gossip disguised as compassion so if I'm saying to you I'm Christina you're Regina and I'm saying Regina I'm really worried about Emma you know, she's just sleeping with all of these guys.
And I'm just really worried that she's going to get hurt or, you know, like, it's just, I mean, I would never, I couldn't do that.
I couldn't do that to myself. I'm just really worried about her.
And so what am I saying in that short sentence?
What am I telling you? I'm telling you about how much sex she's having.
I'm positioning myself morally, uh, in terms of purity, fecundity, all that sort of stuff above.
I am I would never. It allows me to derogate a potential sexual rival whilst couching it in care and compassion.
So if I ever get called up, it's like, look, I'm sorry, but I'm just worried about you.
And I didn't think she was going to tell anybody either.
And guys are just, it just goes past us.
We just, we're absolutely blind to it. We're like the kid from The Sixth Sense, but in reverse.
Right, yes. Yeah, no, I first had my eyes opened to this by, I told you I was a school teacher.
And some of the students I was teaching were going, you know, why don't we study female-female competition?
And this was just a few years ago now, 20, 25 years ago.
Oh, we don't really study that. Well, you should, you know.
And we had an afternoon, so they made me watch Mean Girls.
And it was just sort of, okay, so I realized there's this sort of world that I'm aware of, but like a dog, you know, there were these whistles I wasn't picking up.
And then we've just, in the last 30 years I've seen it happen, we've just got far more female scientists doing behavioral science.
And, you know, they're just not letting that kind of stuff not be studied. um and it's sexy i mean i don't think it was i don't think it was the the men being sort of deliberately sexist it's just we weren't picking up on those things a lot of the time i mean i mean come on there's there's ways that men compete i actually know that's a lie i was i was going to try and make some equivocation but it's wrong because male competition is very upfront it's very obvious female competition but female competition i'm just going to go down the The reason that female intersexual competition is so subtle and couched and deniable, I think that's really, really important, the fact that the deniability of it.
The reason for that is that on average, women are more fragile and more valuable, right?
They can't afford to lose them and they are easier to kill, basically.
And also frequently, I think in history, not around their kin.
I think that was a big, that's a big feature as well.
They've had to form coalitions, yeah. What's that called?
Patrilocal? Yes, yeah. Yeah, so they've been patrilocalized, I guess.
And what this means is if you try to start a fight with fists as a woman, well, the woman that's up against you, the damage is going to be maybe quite high and it's a big risk and all the rest of it.
So you have to use these very subtle forms of status interplay.
And one of the real concerns, again, because there is a guy at the top But the guys tend to be more collaborative when it comes to looking at how the status hierarchy works because someone can be really great in one area but not in the other.
Whereas, this might be a controversial thing to say, the winner takes all happens for women too, right?
Because they get the guy. They get the guy who's got the most resources.
So they're downstream from his level of status also.
And there's this great, really great study.
I think it was Joyce Benenson that did it.
I can't remember quite who did it. female female basketball players on the same team show less physical affection to each other than male basketball players on opposite teams yeah i remember the study yes no it's so fucking interesting i've got a colleague um a colleague in pretty much the next office to me and she she was um a national uh level player i can't remember what i think i think the hypothesis she absolutely agreed with it.
And she said, no, I, I've been on the receiving end of that repeatedly.
I could, I could show you, I could take you to places and show you that in action.
She said, this is absolutely true. Yeah.
Um, and have you, have you seen the, the research done on, um, the number of deaths among, uh, children of co-wives?
Um, so there's, I think, I think, I think you see the do gone.
I don't quote me on this cause I'd have to look it up, but there's, there is a, there's a, a group where, um, there, there's still, uh, to some extent, um, uh, polygamous and the, uh, the, the law courts of particular countries, one of the, one of the, the ex friends, French colonies are largely taken up with poisonings where the, um, is this Cinderella effect stuff?
Yeah. Well, you're well, except the, yes, they're, they're, they're, but they're, they're, they're, they're, they're still living step parents.
So you, so the, the, the high status man will have three or four wives.
But a couple of the sons and one of the wives, the child mortality is a lot higher than it should be.
So there's a lot of tensions going on beneath the surface of humans.
And I think sex researchers, because we tend to be sort of softy liberal indoor types, we tend to sort of assume that everybody would like to, everyone else to have sort of mutually satisfying sex lives.
And so when we actually come across the reality of human sexuality, it can be a bit damaging because, of course, it's not true. up to 20 degrees.
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I remember reading in Gad Saad's book, talking about happiness, he said the right amount of sex that you want in your relationship is not just as much as you want, but it's just a little bit more than the amount that your friends around you are having as well.
Which is the most intimate, private thing that you're going to do maybe except for prayer. is still you've got this you're enmeshed in your local hierarchy and you're thinking how many times did you in the wire three fuck we only did one you know i wouldn't believe the and that was um that was one of the things that really got me interested i mean way way back before um i i switched careers um but back when i was doing my first degree there was um I was about 19.
I had a new girlfriend. There was a friend of ours doing the degree.
She was a lot older than us. Actually, she was the editor of The Face.
So she was almost a generation older than us.
And I remember we were at the pub and she said, well, how do you know she's not faking with you?
And it wasn't quite the scene from where Harry met Sally, but it was sort of, and I just remember thinking, just in my innocence, I was going, well, why would you?
And then the whole table just sort of erupted in laughter.
Can you explain, go a little bit more deeply into it, reveal the veil of what you're talking about here.
Yeah, well, so, I mean, invariably, I mean, if I do talks on this, I'll play that scene from Harry Met Sally, the famous one, you know, where she fakes an orgasm and everybody sort of collapses into laughter.
And it's a great scene. But it's also a very curious event when you think about it.
I mean, you know, if we had a game of tennis...
I mean, it'd be a very bad idea because I can't play the game.
But imagine that I could. And I sort of go, well, I had a great game with Chris.
And Chris is saying, yeah, idiot, Rob, he thinks I enjoyed that game of tennis.
I didn't have a good time at all. Idiot.
I mean, it wouldn't make any sense. This is meant to be something of mutual enjoyment.
And yet somehow it's sort of obvious to people.
And so you look at the proximate level and women will say, well, of course, I'm faking it because I'm bored with him.
I just want him to stop. He's not pressing the right buttons.
I felt sorry for him. Or it's his ego. And all of those things might be true, but they're very superficial.
They don't take us to the nub of anything.
Firstly, they don't tell us why men are interested in it as a signal.
So male comedians might turn around and go, well, I don't care.
So she's faking it. I'm fine with that. Which they're not, but they can make a joke out of it. um secondly it doesn't doesn't explain um why uh why you go to that kind of effort to signal because i mean women are usually quite happy to turn around and tell men they're not interested in them that's not usually a problem for women to go to go not if you you know even even in you know they'll say things like even in a competition of zero of one you'd be a loser you know which is what if you were the last guy on earth i wouldn't sleep that's right yeah even in a competition of one you still come out zero um so yeah women aren't usually that shy about it so why in this case um And I think once you start thinking about these things in terms of signals, then you start thinking, well, what exactly is being signaled here?
One of the things is being signaled to the guy, I mean, I think.
And I was, before COVID happened, have you had Athena on your show, Athena at Kipis?
Yes, didn't she do stuff about, fuck, the end of the world?
She did do stuff about zombies in the end of the world, yes.
And at one point we were in touch with her, she did a lot of stuff about laughter.
And we were going to do a joint thing about laughter and then COVID came along and various other things got in the way.
But one of the main things she found was that laughter can be faked and that you can actually you can look at the sound pattern of laughter being faked.
And basically, if it's voiced, it's more likely to be faked.
If I go, ha, ha, ha, you know, that's that's an obviously fake laugh.
And there are but there are some edge cases where it's not obvious where it's faked.
And we're going to apply the same thing to orgasms. because there are signals of orgasms that are voiced and unvoiced.
And the moment you start bringing that into it, you start saying, well, why do people fake laughter?
Well, because laughter is a signal that you're accepted.
Laughter is a signal that you're dominant.
Laughter is a signal that somebody likes you.
And those are all kinds of things you might want somebody to think, even if they're not true.
And so why would somebody want to think that they're orgasmed when they haven't?
Well, similar kinds of ideas, that actually you have got a good chance of making this person pregnant, therefore you should invest, or this person is attached to you, even if they're not.
And at some point, it'd be nice to do a follow-up and apply the stuff that she was saying about laughter to orgasm sounds.
The other thing, of course, is you're not just signaling to the guy.
You could also be signaling to people around.
This guy is now attached to me. In the same way, this is a really cool intersexual competition insight around women who get their husbands to buy them expensive handbags.
So the unique thing about handbags is that it is a kind of signal.
Like plastic surgery, a lot of the money that gets spent by women is beautification.
But beautification is something that's picked up by men.
But there are certain types of, I guess, enhancement in some ways, or certain types of expenditure that are only picked up by women.
And these are the ones that are really interesting.
And, you know, a niche collector's edition handbag...
Oh, yeah. Like that eight million pound one that was sold the other day.
I didn't see that. But I imagine probably something like that.
And you go, OK, well, what is that saying?
It's it's saying only to other women. Beware, my husband is so invested in me that he's got this fucking niche mulberry bag that's got the orange liner and the longest strap, whatever.
So it's a special type of signal like that.
And I suppose it's not too dissimilar in this way.
So I guess what's interesting here is sex, we think of as being cooperative, unless it's coercive.
And that's a world that we don't want to talk about.
Sex is cooperative. But you've just made the case there that sex can absolutely be competitive and deceptive as well.
Oh, yeah. No, it has all of those things associated with it.
And the thing is, one of the things I find fascinating is we kind of know this, and yet we keep on pretending that we don't.
Let me give an example of exactly what I mean by sort of pretending we don't know it.
So roughly every generation, the same book basically gets published every And it's always written anonymously by a woman.
And it has the same plot, which is you have a sexually dominant male who is brought to realize that he wants to commit to this particular female.
There are always very strong BDSM elements to it.
There is a non-accidental spread of male names.
They're quite often Mr. Gray. Quite often they just have a title, like a captain.
They don't have full names at all. There are often very strong BDSM themes.
There is Anais Nins, Delta of Venus. There was Emmanuel, Rabbi Emmanuel.
There was Nine and a Half Weeks. There was Secretary, which was why I missed out, Story of O. And of course, Fifty Shades of Grey.
And each time one of these books comes out, people go, oh my God, this is a woman being subjected to the evils of the patriarchy.
What man has written this? And we just keep doing this to ourselves as a species.
And a woman comes out and she goes, no, I wrote this.
And then the reason you've heard all of those is because a movie has been made out of each one of those very successfully, to which women dragged their menfolk in droves going, be a bit more like that.
And then we just pretend it doesn't happen again.
And I tried to write a bit about this in the book because I'm not saying it's the only female fantasy.
It's far from it. But it's a not uncommon one.
It's a not uncommon pattern. So fascinating insight on that.
Fuck, who is... Who is the... I'm going to have to be really crude here.
I'm going to have to be really crude because I can't remember a fucking name.
Who is the blonde-haired, big-boobed sex researcher who did the come-on-face research?
Oh, not... Well, the thing is, I know these people, so whatever I say, I could get myself in trouble here.
I'm thinking of either Catherine Salmon... Catherine Salmon, thank you.
Don't say the second one. No need to say the second one.
Catherine Salmon told me, and this is one of my favourite insights.
When you had the ascendancy of the dark romance genre, there was... as you've kind of alluded to there, a little bit of a pushback.
Well, this is a very sort of barbaric base perspective of female sexuality.
It seems to pedestalize the man in a way.
It has a lot of elements of dominance that we don't like.
And in a time where Time's Up and Me Too and all that stuff was coming about, there was a sense that this needed to be sanitized a little bit.
So they came out with... Have you heard of golden retriever husbands or cinnamon roll husbands?
No, I haven't. The reason that I know this...
But I should write this down because I don't want to forget it.
Well, thankfully, we're recording it. So Sim and Roll Husbands, Golden Retriever Husbands.
I spent every summer from the age of 26 to about 32 traveling to America because I was a cover model for Dark Romance books.
Right. Oh, you're the guy who was on those books.
Okay, that makes sense. I'm on quite a few.
And what was fascinating, what they would do is they would fly out the male models.
And imagine a freshers' fair, any kind of convention.
What you want is people to come to your stall.
What's a great way, if you're an author of dark romance, to get people to come to the stall, right? put the model that's on the cover and you can get a photo and he'll sign your book and the author will sign your book and you sell more books, right?
And the bigger authors realized that if they flew the models out, that they would sell so many more books that it compensated for my flight plus, you know, to pay me to eat.
Yeah, it was very fun. But what I noticed was some of the books, some of the stands had these guys that were very non-dominant, not heavy brow, not built, not high, you know, not V-shaped, all of the cues typically, not brooding.
And Catherine brought this up on the episode and she said...
Don't tell me to guess. This was an attempt.
You can see where I'm going to go here. This was an attempt to try and sanitize the overly patriarchal, worryingly dominant world that we had.
And unfortunately, the bugs didn't sell.
Because they didn't. That being said, I mean, balance it out.
The man that you fantasize about is not the man that you want to get into a relationship with.
And in the same way as guys might watch, and this is for men when we're talking about visual stuff with men, like this is a really big effect, right?
If men want to say no to a woman who's attractive in a kind of a way, men will happily watch porn of a woman that they would probably not marry.
Oh, sure, yes. Right? So you go, oh, my God.
Like, there's a hot woman that you want to have sex with that you wouldn't marry?
That's a, you know, what an insane. So you go, okay, well, even in men, we can see this effect.
But in women, absolutely. Because what is it that you're looking for?
Like, are you wanting this guy who's got all of this attention?
And I think that this, you know, going back to the male groupies for women as opposed to female groupies for men, the main concern that you have as a guy is cookholdry.
And if you've got this orbiting pool of a bunch of other men, that makes that partner less desirable.
Because you think, well, fuck, how much additional energy am I going to have to expend with my mate guarding and my jealousy and my intersexual and intersexual competition, all this bullshit?
Okay. Mm-hmm. Sure. And there's a big sort of short-term, long-term mating split as well.
I mean, the people that we might consider, in general, I think men would lower their standards for one-night stands.
Women tend to raise their standards for one-night stands, that kind of stuff. um um and oh that's that's a perfect that's a way quicker way of saying what i just said that's perfect but but but but and there's very good reasons why that would be the case you know and i think we and if we're actually going to be a bit you know if we're going to learn i mean as a species as a culture if we're going to learn from this and sort of move forward and you know we one of the things i talk about in the book is is aloof and intimate societies and um Aloof society is the ones where the sexes just don't get on.
They don't talk to each other. They live in separate villages.
They can live in separate parts of the same village.
Sometimes they have different languages.
And there are quite a lot of cultures that are like this.
And they still have to come together and have sex.
And the women, quite often the anthropologists call these female gardening ecologists, which is sort of code for the women do all the real work.
And the men preen and make magnificent spears and fly into magnificent rages and have duels with each other all the time.
And there are cultures that are like that.
And to some extent, the English public school system modeled itself to a bit on things like Rome and Sparta and places like that.
The trouble with places like that is the men in it are very exciting, but they're not doing the housework.
And you probably wouldn't want them around the house.
They're not properly domesticated. But that doesn't mean we can't pretend.
If women find those kinds of guys sexy, well, we are very much a species that can pretend to do things.
And this is one of the things that those movies I was describing and the books I was describing get into.
They get into role play. They get into pretending.
And if you read women's fantasies, they have a lot of that stuff going on.
It doesn't need to be that. What's it, Dan Savage, the sex advice columnist, he calls a lot of BDSM.
He says it's kind of like cops and robbers, but with your pants off.
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That's nomadic.com slash modernwisdom. So I've been fascinated by this narrative, this sort of meta for the last few weeks.
I've only recently seen it being commented on.
So it's a commentary on, outside of sex, just for a second here, the notebook.
The notebook's a really great example of this.
It's a commentary on the romanticization of the kind of hopeless thug in a way the kind of noble thug you might be able to say so the notebook's a fucking great example of this because you have a guy who is kind of good as a handyman but can't really hold down a job and is passionate but kind of loose and he is victorious up against a decorated war hero who is a successful business person and really slick and equally attractive or whatever and the same I wonder what this is feeding into because, as we've said before, if female desire can be mediated by other females' desire, you have to assume that female desire can be mediated by culture as well.
What are the archetypes that we think are part of our... Was your sexual awakening a bad boy or was your sexual awakening a clean pop star or whatever?
That has to color the way that you got... Just being famous, yeah.
I mean, Colin Firth came to the school where I taught not long before I left.
And one of my students showed him around the school, uh, cause he was thinking of sending his kid there.
Um, and she was one of the sixth form. So she'd be at 17 or 18.
Uh, and she came back to the class and she was appalled at the behavior.
And then this is the, this was the funny bit.
She was pulled at the behavior of the female staff who were following him around the school, spying on him and just behaving like just, I mean, now, I mean, he's a good looking fella.
Um, but you know, mainly cause he's famous, you know, he's, he's been presented to them as, uh, who was Mr. Darcy, wasn't it?
I think it was at the time. you know, he's a good looking chap, but he's not, he's not the best looking chap.
He's not the only good looking chap, but the fact that he was sort of the object of desire in certain films just meant that, and I think he was just, he was just bored, bored with it by that stage.
Yeah. Okay. So getting back to sex, just do a recap for me of what the predictors are.
It was good smell. So immunocompatibility.
Yeah. It was dominance. Dominance, penetrative vigor.
Penetrative vigor. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, we, we, we went there.
Yeah. Um, and, uh, um, and also consider it.
So we're not going, we're not moving on beyond penetrative vigor.
I'm afraid. What's that? Well, okay, so humans have got the largest penises of any primates.
Champion! Let's go! It sounds like I'm boasting.
But, yeah, we're bigger than gorillas. Well, gorillas compete with their – this is one I know to your listeners.
I'm sure gorillas compete with their big 400-pound bodies, but they've got tiny testicles and tiny penises.
Chimps are somewhat stronger, and they're less sexually dimorphic, but their penises aren't as large.
But oboes are as long as ours, but they're not as thick. but also chimps and bonobos are highly promiscuous and so their testicles are huge because they're producing a lot of spermatogenetic material.
With humans, one of the things we seem to be competing with is penis size because we are larger than the other primates and There are some supposed explanations of this based on the head size in the womb.
I go into some detail in the book why I think that's unlikely to be the case.
Just to linger there, is there a suggestion or a theory that human penises need to be bigger because babies' heads need to be bigger, which means that women's vaginas need to be sufficiently sized, which means that the penis is playing catch up to the baby head because if it didn't, female pleasure wouldn't be able to be reached?
Yeah, that's kind of roughly the idea. I go into some detail.
Who knew that our penises were in an arms race against our own babies?
Yeah, I don't buy the story. As I say, I go into some detail in the book with sort of comparative sizes with primate heads and penises.
I sort of try and show why I don't think that's true.
But one of the big clinches is we don't have a baculum.
So other animals, often they have a penile bone, which keeps it stiff.
And we don't. So there's all this talk of sort of female orgasm being sort of inefficient.
And there's this idea, well, that shows as a byproduct.
But of course, male penises aren't always that efficient.
That's why we have a thriving trade in Viagra and Cialis and all the rest of it.
Because it takes a certain amount of health and vitality to produce the kind of penis that will please the partner.
In that way, Does it mean that male erections are a fitness signal identifier?
I think so. We haven't studied this directly, but yeah, the indirect evidence seems to be there.
Plus also, if you ask women, they say it is.
It's one of those things where we get kind of coy about it, like we just did with breast size. um i mean there are these these these big signals that we carry around on our bodies that if you ask the opposite if heterosexual actually no homosexual and heterosexual members of the opposite sex you know do you care about this yeah of course we do of course of course we notice them and of course we care about them what is that what is there any data around length versus girth is that something that's important girth Uh, we asked, we asked women about girth and girth was, was the thing that they, they prized the most.
That seems to be generally true that it is, seems to be thickness rather than length.
Um, yeah. And that, that, that would, that would make sense because, uh, if, if we come back to my clitoris here, um, where, where the penis.
You keep getting confused, Robert, it's a Pokemon.
You keep getting confused by that. But it's the, it's the girth that's sort of producing sort of tension here, uh, around the, the, uh, the glands of the clitoris.
Um, and. These are regions that themselves become engorged with blood when the woman's aroused.
One of the things that causes a lot of confusion with this is that women do need to be more aroused than men do often, and that arousal is quite often internal.
But attention spent there is unlikely to be wasted.
And women take longer to get to that point than men do frequently.
Why is it very easy for some women to orgasm, even multiple times?
It's hard for others and they need a combination of increasingly elaborate stimulation to get there.
And it's impossible as well for a final group.
Yeah. Right. I mean, the simple, honest answer is we don't know.
And I wouldn't want to suggest that my book is a clinical work.
So, you know, there could be things that are clinically up with people.
There could be drug interactions. It could be hormonal interactions.
All of that aside, it's it. Part of the things that confuse it is that for a variety of reasons, women will have sex when they're not aroused.
I'm not just talking about the obvious grisly cases of coercion.
It's just a sort of, oh, let's just get on with it.
I'm not really into it kind of situation, which I'm sure happens all the time.
Also, I think a lot of the time people can only have sex if they're on some kind of drug, including alcohol.
That doesn't help. And they're coy about telling their partners what they want.
I mean, one of the ways that you run interference on people, if you're a dominant female baboon, you go around sort of whacking the other female baboons on the back of the head and that raises their cortisol levels and that makes it less likely to reach you.
Yes. Yeah. Well, this is one of the arguments for concealed female ovulation in humans, right?
That it doesn't allow other women to fuck with you when you're ovulating.
Right. well we're we're we're better than baboons because we do it by just going around and telling people how they're allowed to orgasm i mean there is there is genuinely no culture where um which is neutral about female orgasm now and this is where it gets interesting and i think i've got i've got some speculative suggestions but i and some patterns but there are some cultures that celebrate female orgasm i mean to the point um there are those um Those temples at Karnataka, I think they are, where they've actually got representations on the walls over a thousand years old of how to generate orgasm in everybody, in every possible permutation, to cultures where they chop off bits of the clitoris and infibulate people in order to try and prevent them having an orgasm at all.
And there's everything in between. And some of the things that are in between are things like use of guilt, use of misinformation, and all kinds of other stuff like that, which are basically just running sexual interference on each other.
That's what those mechanisms, that's what those behaviors are.
I mean, you just described some great examples with venting.
But also, you know, telling people that they have to lie back and think of England is actually a sexual interference strategy, for example.
Yeah. Yeah. That if you don't enjoy sex that much, you're not going to be looking for elsewhere, which means that my partner who's supposed to be loyal to me isn't going to be taken away by you because you don't actually enjoy sex.
OK. Yeah. Look, I I'm sort of pretty fascinated by the. a range of physiological blessing and curse that I guess women have got when it comes to their ability to orgasm.
Look, I have a non-zero sample of partners across my life.
And aside from a kind of slow linear increase in experience, Mm-hmm.
I've been the same person. So you say that we can't do random controlled trials, but at least I'm a pretty good control because I've been the same person.
You are a longitudinal study, yeah. Of myself, yeah, exactly.
And unless I've had wild variation in how much women are attracted to me, which I'm sure that I have, but unless it's been really, really high... there is a barbell spectrum from one end, which is very easy over and over, to another end, which is we could be here for days and it's not going to happen.
And I think the conversation around female orgasm in culture is really interesting because it's almost always laid at the feet of the man's job to understand the woman's body better.
And I think that this is a it's like noble in a way, like women are sensitive about their bodies and don't make them more fucking sensitive.
Um, yeah, I haven't seen the same thing.
So if, if a woman didn't reach orgasm a lot of the time, it would be, well, why don't you ask your partner to do this?
And what the foreplay wasn't there. And you maybe, maybe attraction isn't there and so on and so forth.
Very rarely, uh, is the finger sort of pointed toward, well, you know, maybe you're physiologically just unfortunate in this sort of a way or whatever.
But if the reverse happens, if you have, I think kind of the only real equivalent that we have as men is not being able to get it up.
Um, and, but if that happens, I never see a headline that's like men, not erect women to blame.
It's like men, not erect men to blame women, not orgasming also men to blame.
So I do think, I do think that's how female sexual selection works.
I mean, I mean, yeah. It is our fault. We're right to feel judged.
We're being judged. At all times. Your performance anxiety is well-founded.
Not just yours, all of ours. I count myself lucky that I was cuter when I was younger.
And older women sort of explain things to me and I pay attention in class.
I see, I see. like the man giants i suppose one of i suppose one thing i mean being less facetious i mean we certainly discovered a pattern that women become more orgasmic as they get older and i think one of the reasons there's a bunch of reasons for that one is that they they know the kind of men they like also they know the kind of activities they like and also i think they they they become aware of of how uh their potential coyness could be exploited by other people saying well you shouldn't do that you're allowed to do this and This would be a bit dirty if you did that and all the rest of it.
And they just they reject all of that. They go, screw all that stuff.
You know, I know what I want and I'm going to be more demanding.
And I also announced to my male partner that perhaps I'm not as fragile as some people might have let him to believe, you know, all these kinds of things.
Yeah. Well, I wonder whether fears of signaling fecundity become less salient as you get older, right?
It's like, who are we kidding? I'm 47. Fucking like menopausal, you know, like we're not, this isn't the first time.
So I wonder if that's part of it. Certainly confidence in the bedroom, being able to take charge in that sort of a way.
Have you seen any data that around hormonal birth control impacting orgasm rate ability sensation speeds yeah i'm i'm i have and i'm i'm actually just i'm just reading up about that at the moment um i can't remember the book i'm reading um but there is It might be your brain on the pill.
This is Your Brain on Birth Control by Sarah Hill.
It was listening to someone on your show made me think I ought to go and study this in more detail.
We've certainly, interviewing people, we've certainly found that hormonal birth control affects who they find attractive.
We haven't actually studied whether it has an effect on their orgasms.
I have to confess, I'd be very surprised if it doesn't.
And I think it's a real gap in the data because I think it almost has to change.
That would be a great, That would be like a headline-grabbing study if you did that.
I really think it would because if you were to find out that this thing which stops you from getting pregnant also stops you from enjoying sex as much, how many girls go on birth control before they've had sex for the first time, 15, 16, whatever, and then go through their entire adult life their entire sexual career up until the point at which they decide to have kids if they decide to do that and they just have this assumption about the way that their sort of sexual mechanics work and they don't realize that there was this hormonal It's this massive experiment we've done on a huge amount of the population without an awful lot of control on it.
And it's particularly ironic because frequently when we're doing experiments on the species, we leave the women out.
Exclusively being done on the women. Only women, yeah.
I mean, actually, it's not even just on our species.
The number of experiments where people think, oh, you know, we've studied the brains of rats.
And it turns out, actually, we've studied the brains of male rats exclusively.
Yeah. Okay. What do you make of the orgasm gap then?
How does this come to sort of settle? Oh, well, I mean, it's definitely there because once a man gets erect, he's very likely to orgasm through penetrative sex.
Although it's not certain by any manner of means, but he's very much more likely to.
Whereas if a woman gets aroused, then there needs to be...
There probably needs to be more than just penetration in order to create an orgasm in her.
So there will probably need to be other things, and those things just might be lacking, whether they're a bit of external stimulation, a bit of additional stimulation to other areas. or just highly vigorous penetration, which a lot of guys aren't providing because it's actually a physical demand.
I saw a study recently that said women typically believe their marriages have about the right frequency of sex.
Okay. Whereas men wished for more, twice as much as they were having.
This suggests that many couples adjust their sexual frequency to the lower rate of desire by the wife.
Right. I wouldn't be surprised if that was true.
I mean, with the usual provisos, you know, there are exceptions to this.
You would expect there to be a certain amount of it's just fun and it's pair bonding and all the rest of it because that's going on.
Have you come across the concept of lesbian bed death?
No, but I love the name. And I've just forgotten, Pepper Schwartz is the sociologist who coined the term.
And what she said was after a certain amount of time, sort of lesbians just stop having sex.
And I think it's more likely to be the case with heterosexual couples that it's the man who's being the instigator just because of things like testosterone levels.
He's just, when you've got a lesbian couple, then the chances are that you don't have somebody with the kind of levels of testosterone or either one person, you know, there won't even be one person in the relationship who is always doing the pushing.
There could be, but it's quite possible that you wouldn't, but it wouldn't be.
I have to assume that if we go to the other end of the barbell and we have gay relationships, it's surprising they get anything done.
I think that's often the case, yeah. And if you get a new gay couple that you know, quite often you don't see them for weeks or possibly months.
One of the other differences, of course, is that men have a different refraction period.
So they will just kind of wear out after a while.
Why is it that women can orgasm multiple times within a single session of sex?
We don't know, but it will be great to know.
I suspect it's because in the early stages, they're getting very demanding because what's happening is they're getting a hold of a guy.
They're signaling to him, I'm going to have your baby, basically.
He's getting massive signals of invest heavily in this person.
They're orgasming a lot. As long as he's up to the mark, have as much sex with her as possible and make sure that she's pregnant.
And once that's over with, then you need some kind of adjustments to happen, don't you?
You don't want him to be continually pestering you for sex.
You don't want him to be running off. So women have got a tough job to do.
They've got to get this guy. They've got to make him very excited, make him have lots of sex, and then sort of slow him down at that point and go, well, now do some other things.
Wow. Okay. Well, what can we learn then about female orgasm from casual sex compared with coupled sex compared with long-term coupled sex?
Because it seems, yeah. Well, most of the data are that the casual sex is less likely to produce orgasm in females.
Why? Why? well i i think it's it's simply because one of the things you're doing is you're you're learning what that partner wants and you're learning what pleases them um however if it does produce an orgasm i've got a i've got a feeling and this this is this is speculative on my part but i've got a feeling it's the kind of thing that underwrites you had dave debus on the show haven't you talking about um i i i because i mean initially a lot of his research was on the idea of of sort of um sort of sperm harvesting behind the scenes.
And I know he sort of, he's moved away from that.
I think that still happens. I think even if it only happens 1% of the time, that's plenty to drive adaptations.
What do you mean when you talk about sperm harvesting?
Oh, that you have a primary partner who is the investor and you're sort of the Lady Chatterley strategy.
So you've got this sort of the investing partner and you've got the sperm supplying partner behind the scenes who's clandestine.
Does that suggest then, have you seen any data that women who are having extramarital affairs are more likely to orgasm with their extramarital partner than the marital partner?
I think the chances are they're less likely to orgasm, but if they are, if they're more likely to orgasm, then they're more likely to mate switch, I think.
That's a lead indicator that the lagging indicator of the relationship being over is going to happen soon.
Yeah. I mean, I've got, I've got someone who now understands me, you know, I can, I can move on.
Um, so I think, I think that can happen, but I also, I mean, I think, um, uh, I don't want to speak for, for, uh, for Dave bus here.
Um, I think, I think he's, he's, but I'm, I'm, I'm going to, but I mean, subject to his, his approval, um, quite a lot of the women will fall in love with the person that they're, they're, um, sort of, uh, they're seeing behind the scenes, which would be a bad strategy if you're just trying to get genes from him and you're trying to keep your primary investment.
So although the sperm harvesting thing does seem to be a strategy, it's probably not the primary one.
The primary one is probably just to go from one partner to the next and use sex as a test bed of who is the one who's actually going to have your babies with you and invest in you.
I mean, it really just is female selection all the way down, eh?
Yes. Do you know there's an evolutionary biologist called Olivia Judson?
And she was kind of mentor of mine in the early days.
She taught me a lot of evolutionary biology.
And she's written a book, which I recommend to everyone.
It was called Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to the Whole of Creation.
And in it, she adopts this persona of a, she's like an agony aunt.
And, um, the, the, the letters will be sort of, you know, dear Dr. Tatiana, um, I can't have sex unless my husband's head has been ripped off and I've eaten it.
Is this normal Mrs. Praying Mantis? And then there's sort of the response is all sort of, you know, why, why you've evolved like this and why, you know, why it's good evolutionary biology.
And it's witty and it's, and it's well-informed.
Um, but one of the things that she says, um, well, there's a couple of things that she says.
One is that the battle of the sexes is eternal, insoluble and inevitable.
So, you know, we need to sort of accept it and sort of try and live with it and also move on.
And the crucial point, well, the crucial point she instilled from an early age was that female choice is the key driver in all primates and that we are no exception to that.
And it was really that that, you know, that made me look at female orgasm in that way, because it's supposed... uh, inefficiencies, um, the orgasm gap, uh, and all the rest of it are really just, they're, they're signifiers that, that women are being picky.
Uh, they're not being coy. They're just, uh, they're extremely picky and that's reflected in all of their behaviors.
I think one of the problems we've got with social media is because, because Female sexual selection is inherently quite a comparative one.
We've just widened the potential comparative base to a point where I think you might be receiving a signal that the number of potential partners is in the thousands or the tens of thousands.
And so actually making a choice between them becomes computationally just intractable at this point.
I wonder if female orgasm rates have gone down.
It's an interesting question. I don't know.
Because there's more – you have this perspective that there are more available mates out there.
That means that any individual mate is less likely to meet your bar, which means that this fitness test, this Navy SEAL hell week that you're putting –
I mean, sex can be fun as well. I'm sure.
It's exclusively competitive and conflict and deceptive, according to you, Dib.
It's the bit where you go into the chamber and they throw the gas in that's perhaps too much.
Yes, too much happening. Okay, how would you characterize modern sexual culture then?
We've got shows like Love Island happening at the moment, which has kind of taken America by storm, despite me trying to flee away from it over here. um we have you know like even in an interesting conversation around are men kind of allowed to say what they want in the bedroom without it seeming um patriarchal or demanding or uh like it's subjugating their partner in some sort of a way uh women have got this either they've got their vestiges of the past which i think cosmopolitan and those sort of magazines have done a pretty good job at dispensing you know five new positions to try with him this easter and shit like that like we've normalized the conversation around female sex in a way actually this is another another uh point i think that women believe that guys sit around and talk about sex Like, like just the two of us.
I mean, yeah, yeah. Which we've done for an hour and a half.
Um, but I think that they believe that guys sit around and talk about their sex lives.
I have an update. Guys don't sit around and talk about their sex lives in that sort of way.
If, if I was to say, all right, mate, what's the sex like between you and the missus?
You go, uh, what do you fucking fancy her or something?
Why do you want to know about the sex between me and my missus?
Whereas I don't know how frequent it is, but I would better big fucking chunk of change that it is way more.
Oh yeah, definitely is. Yeah. Um, and, um, Yes.
I remember when the Trump grabbing women by the pussy thing came out and there was this sort of, oh, it's locker room talk, locker room talk.
I remember thinking, I've been in quite a lot of locker rooms over the years.
I have never heard that kind of talk. Maybe I'm going into the wrong locker rooms or maybe I'm just not the kind of guy people say those things to.
But no, I'd agree with you. I mean, there are guys who boast like that, but they just tend to be seen as being boastful.
It's only ever around short-term mating.
It's never around long-term mating as well.
Right. Now, I think that's that. And I don't think that's changed.
I think I think it's because it's partly because women have this incredibly difficult job to do.
I was just talking about this sort of one of the patterns is that they find sexual dominance in the bedroom very erotic.
Not all women, but many women do. I mean, enough enough to fuel 50 Shades of Grey. multi-billion pound industry.
Yet the trouble is, if you say that, if you say that openly, then you remove one of your primary mechanisms for being able to distinguish between the kind of person who you want to be dominant in the bedroom and the kind of person you wouldn't want within a million miles of you. um who might then sort of go well she you know she gave me the green light to behave like this and so that's a that's a very difficult it's like the kind of signaling problem that gay men used to have before homosexuality was legal that you know you you want you wanted you wanted you wanted people to know you were gay however the wrong people might suddenly know that you were gay and you could find yourself in a lot of trouble you know either legal or or you know or violent but i i don't think that problem ever goes completely away for women because there are always men out there who are potentially willing to exploit that so you have to be on guard for that kind of thing um i mean as for as for the sort of the sexual culture i've heard some people of my age say um you know it feels like i've got the last helicopter out of saigon which may be a bit bit much but i i'm glad i'm not a young person dating because uh it I mean, I'm around a lot of young people because I was a school teacher and now I'm a university teacher and I see young people dating and they don't seem happy.
They don't seem as happy as I was when I was their age.
It seems to be really fraught. It seems to be really tense.
And that isn't just sort of me being an old guy sort of waving his fist at the clouds because they're not getting married.
They're not having kids. There is a demographic collapse.
Unfortunately, discussion of that has now become left-right coded, God help us, which means that sensible discussion of it is going to be increasingly hard.
I have eaten a metric ton of shit because I can't talk about birth rate decline without being accused of shilling for Ben Shapiro or something like that.
Yeah, I know. Yeah. I mean, every time Ben opens his mouth about female orgasm, he puts something in it.
Yeah, he wasn't exactly fantastic on that subject.
But look, I was thinking about this earlier on today.
One of the most painful situations that you can be in as somebody that sort of thinks about the world is to be right but early. this is a right but early oh my god the unrequited the bitterness the resentment the sense of do you not remember what i said that you just needed to listen to me i uh i i'm i'm fucking adamant that birth rate decline is going to be one of those right but early things everybody that's talking about it is right but And everybody that's pushing back against them is just disincentivizing a really important conversation to be had.
Can this be weaponized and pointed in a direction that's real nefarious?
Yes. I think we proved to ourselves there is nothing that can't be weaponized politically.
I genuinely think there is nothing. And we just have to set that aside, I'm afraid.
This is an interesting stat that I've got for you here.
Porn featuring violence against women is also extremely popular among women.
It is far more popular among women than men.
I hate saying that because misogynists seem to love this fact.
Fantasy life isn't always politically correct.
The rate at which women watch violent porn is roughly the same in every part of the world.
It isn't even correlated with how women are treated.
That sounds like something Jemaine Greer said, and it got her into a lot of trouble.
But I can top that. I can get people to hate me even more than they hate you.
So we haven't even talked about another big strand of our research here, which is into spree killers.
So. I started studying spree killers a few years back and I got really interested in the different types of spree killer.
And now we've become, I've got a PhD student, we've become interested in whether, because these are almost always men, go out and they kill strangers publicly and they seem to fall into two types.
It wasn't really known when we first started this.
There's an older type who tends to be a family controller.
And he tends to kill family members. And he has very little in common with the younger type, who tends to be the school shooter and tends to have a history of mental illness, school refusal.
And the one is not an older version of the other.
Here's the bit that was really disturbing when a student of mine came along and said, have we tried studying the people who fetishize them?
And so we did a study on hybristophiles.
And these are exclusively women. who fetishize killers.
And we found, once again, we found two types there.
We found the ones who didn't really distinguish between just the good-looking bad boys, and there wasn't really much difference in the fan material they produced, whether it was, say, One Direction or whether it was a spree killer.
But there was a small number, a persistent number.
And I'm not a forensic psychologist, but I used to be a forensic psychologist living next door to me in the department.
I knocked on his door and said, is this interesting?
Is this known? He went, no, you should publish this.
This is really interesting. Because the subtype fetishized the killing, and they're very open about it.
And they go along to the courts and they produce erotic material that is extremely violent, focuses on the pain and misery of the victims.
And openly says they desire the people that do it and to join in.
Look at fucking Luigi Mangione. Yes, I know.
Sex symbol overnight. People like the shoes he had on was sold out.
Yes. He has a style icon. We have a dark element to our character as a species.
And I think a lot of years of looking at, for example, the way that women have been victimized in society, and no point am I suggesting that any of that is remotely false. sort of blinded people to the fact that women hold up half the sky, but they also produce half the shit.
And we are a sexually reproducing species.
We're a mutually sexually reproducing species.
And we need to stop having sex with the psychopaths.
All of us. Right. Well, good luck interjecting there.
I mean, this is, again... Such an interesting area to think about when it comes to the relational, like where culture meets desire and the story that we tell ourselves.
Because as soon as you say women can't be deceptive during sex, women can't be coercive during sex.
They can't be manipulative. They can't steal partners from others.
They can't monkey branch. They can't use, they can't keep their male friends, all the male friends they've got, the orbiters.
Interestingly, they all seem to be around about the same, similar level of attractiveness to the man that they're with.
All of this stuff. And it's like, no, no, no, no.
Women don't do any of that stuff. Or they do do it, but they don't do it at that much of a level.
Okay. So you're telling me that women are completely passive sexual objects who have no agency over their future.
And all that they do is blow with the wind with whatever man comes in front of them first.
Yes. Evidently not. Evidently not. So square this circle for me, dude.
Like square the circle. Sorry, are you asking me to defend that position?
No, not at all. My imaginary sort of blank slate, female agent, sexual agency denying.
But what you're saying is itself a strategy.
I mean, one of the best ways of manipulating men and other women in the environment is to pretend that you are a coy, passive recipient of male ardor.
That's one of the things that fooled the Victorian male biologists.
It fooled Darwin up to a point. He could see the sexual selection was happening, but it can't be happening to me, surely.
It bugged him because... Charles, I would never.
I could never do that to you. Absolutely.
I could never be on the receiving end of it.
Of course, heterosexual men, we are fooled a lot of the time and facing up to that is tough for us and Also, it makes it sound like women are sort of conspiring behind the scenes.
And some of them are, of course, but quite a lot of them aren't even aware that they're doing those things, which is why it's good.
I mean, all of that is changing. People like Catherine, for example, we just talked about her.
She comes on. She's unequivocal. She's smart.
She's uncompromising. um she's not not not ashamed of the way she looks and um and she's willing to do the science and you know but 40 years ago there weren't there wasn't a body of people like that doing behavioral science and now now there is and you know i think i think that's almost certainly you know um hope for improvement, isn't it?
Unbelievable. Dr. Robert King, ladies and gentlemen.
Robert, you're great. Where should people go?
They're going to want to check out the book and everything else that you do.
Oh, that's very kind. I don't have a social media presence.
I kind of got rid of my social media presence because it just felt I wasn't there.
The, the, the, the net, the net worth wasn't there.
Um, I should probably set myself up a YouTube channel for things like this to be on.
Um, I've got the book, um, which is called naturally selective.
Um, and, um, I've got my, uh, academia.edu and all those kinds of sites where I put my, um, papers and all the rest of it that's it really i i should perhaps be more media savvy about these kinds of things but the book is a uh a really great deep work so if what we get from you is books and what we lose from you is instagram posts i think that's right well i i've seen i've seen colleagues and friends not not necessarily ones here at ucc but i have seen people who were more eminent than me suddenly go down the twitter route and suddenly are pining about things.
I'm sort of going, I know you. Why are you talking about this?
The work also takes a nose dive, a concurrent nose dive with that a lot.
I said, well, why are you talking about this?
And I said, well, you're getting all these Twitter likes for it.
And it's clearly highly addictive. And we were the kind of nerdy types at school who weren't particularly the pretty ones or the popular ones.
And I think getting a bit of that popular, I'm just talking about scientists, not you, because you're clearly both.
But the colleagues I'm thinking about, the kind of people who needed a bit of popularity, once they get it, they can't stop themselves.
It's like a drug to them. And I don't think it's good for them.
Wow. Okay, dude, you're great. Thank you so much for today.
I've really, really enjoyed this one. Until next time.
I got you. Thank you, man. If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.
It is 100 books that you should read before you die.
The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.
And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.
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