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Whatifalth
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.
Rudyard Lynch
Hola. Como estas? Austin is our co host and the topic today is the history of sex. And I'm diversifying here for this video and the next video. And we're still going to keep doing the actual historic time periods. I think that's the videos where I have the best forte and it's also a legitimate education. When I was growing up, they would say, oh, we stopped teaching history around dates and facts. We teach it about themes and values and that stuff. And that was just used to rationalize teaching propaganda and not actually teaching history. So this is going to stay. Probably over 90% of the videos are still going to be about different historic eras. But I'm going to, for the final 10%, pepper in thematic topics. So for this it's going to be sex and the next episode's going to be the history of mysticism. And my initial thought for this video was to make a video about explaining the history of sex as in the act of coitus. However, as I tried to figure out this topic, I came to realize the only way to understand that is to look at the relationships between men and women over history. Because the physical act of coitus in any given historic context is completely predicated upon the social relationship between men and women in that society.
Austin Padgett
Yeah, I guess ours is the least society that fits that pattern. So maybe it's not as natural for us. Yeah, but when you go to a part of a third world country with a real culture, not like, you know, a prostitution heavy city or something, then there is no like, you know, going on Tinder and meeting a girl. It's like it's all very controlled within the social relations that exist there.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, Austin used to live in Southeast Asia and so I'm sure you saw some of that. And I think trigger warnings are cringe, so I'm not going to give one. What I will say is that the title of this video is pretty obvious. So if you don't want to hear about sexual topics, don't watch the video. That should be pretty self explanatory. And I think, I think the culture of hiding sex from children is not good. And I have my own for those who know my backstory. You do. Where I think children could see very bad things about the world and they should have a frame of reference that Things like sex or violence or power hierarchies or all these things exist because there's like a not low chance that a child gets stuck in a war zone or some strange sexual situation or something like that. And they need to at least know what's going on. And the. Our society's attitude towards sex is one of the strangest ever in history. And that's something where I'm not going to talk about it initially, because the only way our society's attitude towards sex will make sense is, is that if you see it in comparison to literally everyone else in history, because we have to start with the rest of history and then work back to our society, which is a consistent problem with anthropology in general. Where most anthropology textbooks, and especially so sociology, which is not a real field, they treat being an educated secular Anglo in a suburb of a blue state as the normal human person. So for anthropology textbooks, I am a rural religious Anglo, which is anthropologically incredibly close to the person they're modeling their behavior off. But I feel completely no cultural recognition by those models. And even more so India and Africa. Most people in history live vastly much more like India or Africa than the modern west, especially so educated secular people in the modern West. So one of the big issues our society faces, and this is a huge categorical error that you can't brush away, is that because we've so warped the frame of comparison, we exist vastly outside the mental model of what a normal human society should look like. But because we have no frame of reference, when we try to change, we make ourselves more and more different from normal human societies. Which means we're just spiraling further into madness and further away from the ability to reset.
Austin Padgett
Right. Because in the current environment, there's no frame of reference, there's no standards, there's no rules. So it's like trying to figure out the rules of a system through looking at studying Sodom and Gomorrah.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. Where the removal of the frame of comparison allows you to say literally anything. And the left manipulates the boxes and the definitions they use, so they're always right by definition. And when I say the left, I really mean the modernist materialist paradigm. I should make a nickname or an acronym for that. Where the modernist materialist paradigm is the mental box of modernity. And it's more so a series of just rough ideas which were accepted without question, but which are in direct opposition to the rest of human history that the past had nothing to teach us. There is no God, there is no divine progress, just kind of Innately happens as its own God. Because the reality is progress occurs when humans work hard and make good decisions. Progress just doesn't happen. There's the idea that only things that are touched, touchable and measurable exist. That implicit things like love or community or culture or tradition don't exist. The modernist worldview, the more you examine it, the more crazy it is. But the way to see sex over history is as archetypal. Where we should talk about the philosophy of archetypes, but I think the Hermetics got sex right. Where the Hermetica is the philosophy of alchemy and inside the Hermetica, the Hermetica is a mystic path which exists in a sort of syncretism with other religions. So you could be a Christian hermetic, you could be a Muslim hermetic, a Greco Roman hermetic, where all of those cultures had it. So it's a sort of. It's kind of like Daoism, where it's a mystic path, the of a series of tools that work under different contexts that you can add on top of other religions that contradicting them. And in the Hermetica, it's an increasing life force and life charge. And the way to do that is to cross masculine and feminine energy. And so it's the yin and the yang. And that's a consistent theme in Chinese culture where the yin and the yang are masculine order based energy versus feminine chaotic energy. And these are themes in every major world culture. It's why so many languages, including the Romance languages, have masculine and feminine tenses. English is one of the few languages that doesn't have that. And so it signifies there's a sort of innate sexual polarity to life itself. And I can talk about this, but it's a completely reasonable idea that it's just obvious in the world that there's this innate duality between masculine and feminine order and chaos and day and night, love and hate. Where the universe is trinitarian, there's two dualities which create a third. Which is why in Christianity and many other world religions, God is the Trinity. And so when you're looking at sex, you're looking at this innate biological polarity which has to exist inside human societies archetypally. And then from there different societies and different concepts interact with the archetype.
Austin Padgett
And this is important because it relates to the modern situation where it explains why female and male relationships are more compelling and of kind of different category than same sex relationships. Like they don't have the same ability to fuse off that interplay of the masculine and feminine.
Rudyard Lynch
But Achilles and Patroclus.
Austin Padgett
Yeah, which was fake news.
Rudyard Lynch
No.
Austin Padgett
Which is another thing about sex is men used to hold hands and walk down the street, like they do that in India, where it's a highly monogamous culture. But because there's all the implications of potential gay relationships, then you lose the ability to have, like, that masculine bond. I want to say gay with totally no homo.
Rudyard Lynch
I want to say gay with an H, but that defeats the entire point I'm trying to make. So. Yes. And my favorite author in this field, Amore Durian Core. He's one of my favorite books ever, Sex and Power in History. And he wrote this book in, like, 1969. 61, which is the last time you could have written this book. Because he talks about the innate polarity of men and women, and it goes through every civilization in history and explains how the relationships between men and women in said civilization resulted in their rise and fall. So it's an absolutely incredible book. And Amori talks about how. So to go back to the Hermetica, and this is true across a lot of mystic traditions, the masculine is the doing and the feminine is being. And so the feminine is. The feminine naturally tries to be fluid, and it naturally tries the term is nature consistent like Mother Nature. Mother Nature is what it is. And then the masculine is doing and accomplishing. Where men try to have social status by being something to the most degree possible. And if you see how men and women talk, the way men debate is they stake out a singular position and hold it and fight over it. And then men fight over who holds frames through gaining responsibility. And women compete through how fluid they can be, where if they can marry a rich man, that gives them a degree of strategic fluidity. If they. It's the weird combination of why women like bad boys, but they're also scared of threats, because an external threat, like a tiger or a monster, that's something where it's a genuine threat to your fluidity and your ability to be in your environment. But the thing is that the bad boy is irresponsible enough that he also increases fluidity because you can. The bad boy is this chaotic force, and so he gets in the way of a monotonous daily experience. And lots of women's motivations are the avoidance of boredom because women don't have war. And so they look to social life as a sort of their vector for competition and entertainment. And so you're looking at this desire to be as fluid as possible versus your desire to be as stable as possible. And this is men and women. And in the Hermetica, the symbolism is the night kills the dragon and fucks the princess. You conquer the negative feminine or nature to impregnate the positive feminine. So in the Hermetica, you try to pair the highest quality male psychic energy with the highest quality female psychic energy. And then that creates a positive evolutionary process where the purpose of the Hermetica is to evolve to higher forms of life and to evolve to be grander and smarter and stronger and more moral. And so the Hermetics had this concept thousands of years ago of using the evolutionary process as a way to improve in that manner through sex.
Austin Padgett
Right. And the only way you can reach those ultimate heights is through that duality, which makes it categorically different. And the dynamic you're referring to is the classic motorcycle guy versus homemaker. And you can't. This is a huge tension, a real struggle for women. Because you can't underestimate how much they dislike the homemaker without the motorcycle flare and how miserable they are with the motorcycle guy without the homemaker.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
Austin Padgett
Qualities you can really struggle to get both of these. Yeah.
Rudyard Lynch
You can see it's a real consistent. It's a real consistent psychological issue that they are often aware of or they don't know what to do with, because whoever you're sexually attracted to is whoever you're sexually attracted to. And not having sex, having sex with someone you're not sexually attracted to comes across as physically disgusting. So I get it.
Austin Padgett
That's it, right? That's it.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And it just hits into. Sex is very closely wired into human disgust sensitivity to a very strong degree, maybe even more than food or shit or just things or disease. The things where, you know, we have a strong genetic disgust sensitivity. When Hinduism makes a taboo about it. Hinduism makes taboos in Judaism, they make strong taboos. Sex about, cleaning about. It's funny, they have. India has tremendous amounts of religious taboos about cleanliness and bathing and that stuff. And then you go to India. It's just remarkable. And you also lived in India, so you've got a story or two. And so across the archetypes are really important in. Most people today don't understand archetypes, but they're actually a fairly simple concept where I have. I have two terms. One is. I have a term called beyond the behind the veil. Where it's beyond behind the veil is what I mean for leaving Plato's cave, where Plato's cave is the outwards physical manifestation of the world. And then you can see the archetypal forces which manifest across physical reality. So examples are that the masculine and the feminine are clear archetypal principles which people build their societies around, where if you don't respect the masculine, feminine archetype, your society is just not going to mate, which is what's going on now. We've seen a systemic mating, basically market collapse because we stop respecting the archetypes enough. And then you have the. The Greeks and the Romans perceived the world naturally in this manner because they were polytheistic. But you've got these abstract principles like Mars is martial courage. Venus is the force of addictive lust. Jupiter is like the sort of cosmic higher force that is the moral standard everything's held to. So the Greco Romans had a natural concept that there's these sort of underlying principles which manifest over material reality. And material reality has to match up with the archetypes to win. So, for example, there's an abstract concept of goodness or victory or efficiency. And your ability to match the. Your ability to match the archetype is what determines your victory. It's like the laws of physics exist in that even though you can't physically touch them, there are laws of physics. And there has to be a mental paradigm in which you can see the rules that the game is being played by. Because modernity, for neurological reasons, they can see the material things, but they're incapable of recognizing the existence of non material things that have manifestations over physical reality. But they acknowledge the existence of them by having, like, say, the laws of physics or the laws of science. But they can't zoom out and think, why are there natural laws? Because if there's natural laws, it means there's a higher plane of ideal existence which can manifest over the materia, which is obvious to everyone across history. And we never disproved it. We are just. Our neurology became so mechanistic and autistic, we just weren't able to see it.
Austin Padgett
And that leads fairly directly into the idea of God.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, right.
Austin Padgett
And a non material conception of the universe. Even though a lot of people who talk about natural law can color it in a non religious framework as well, it naturally aligns with those ideas. Yeah.
Whatifalth
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
Rudyard Lynch
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Austin Padgett
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Rudyard Lynch
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Rudyard Lynch
When.
Whatifalth
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Rudyard Lynch
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Whatifalth
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Rudyard Lynch
What a lot of modernists think is that when you trust the spiritual or the ideal that it's just raw chaos and that you're just going to get, you're just going to get just insanity. Because in our culture, in our culture we've tried to remove invisibles. And invisibles are the ability to have non touchable concepts which manifest over reality. And you need to have a certain degree of invisibles to have a functioning society. And where the society chooses to draw their lines on invisibles depends on their context. It could be you have a polytheistic religion, a monotheistic religion. You could be governed by a sort of like secular philosophy, like Confucianism attached to Taoism, which is a form of alchemy, which is what China did. So you can divide the invisibles however much you want, but you have to have them. And modernity is playing the sort of shit test of trying to remove all invisibles. But when they don't remove an invisible, they're not honest about being invisible. For the Left, as an example, they posit that equality, social engineering in progress, or moral aims in of themselves. But what they've done is install a moral structure, demand their moral structure is correct by definition. And then they've shut off everyone else from debating the topic because they've what. What the modernist materialists always do is they say everyone else's argument except me is invalid because there's this. No, there's no higher tier of consciousness or logic about which we can argue about these macro value structures. And so we win by definition. And then we're going to. Just because pre industrial societies communicated with God on a frequent and fairly direct basis, they communicated with God or the gods enough that they could build entire social, they could build their entire society around it, because there was a consistent enough thread of communication that was trustworthy enough that the smartest people in their societies tended to believe it with complete certainty. And this is 99% of historic societies. What we did as modernity is basically ignore that and then argue about the invisibles, which we find pertinent in that context, say that all the other invisibles physically cannot exist. So what the left did is basically establish. What the modern materialists did was basically establish a psychic shield wall where people couldn't reach out to different people, couldn't relate to previous religious or philosophic paradigms. And because it was impossible, but because they believed it was impossible, it created this social system where it was impossible. Am I making sense to you?
Austin Padgett
Yeah. Basically you make everything subjective and then you can take over with your whatever, your idea or your motivating.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
Austin Padgett
Ideology, which is obviously a contradiction that suits the will to power. And then the thing about closing your eyes to the unseen as a cosmic shit test reminds me exactly of kids, toddlers, playing peekaboo because they're like living within their own subjective frame of reality and like shit testing you to whether you'll be able to find them when their hands are over their eyes.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
Austin Padgett
Like, especially when they get more conscious of the dynamic too. And they're still doing it.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, you're right. It's.
Austin Padgett
They're hiding themselves from the idea of natural law and like daring it to find them, which it always does.
Rudyard Lynch
When I was a kid, when I was scared, I'd build the blanket fort and I'd think, like, if I had blankets and pillows all around me, I'm safe. Merch, show them the merch.
Austin Padgett
Oh, merch, blankets, pillow.
Rudyard Lynch
We don't have links below for merch. And that's kind of what we're doing where we just deny the existence of reality. And then we think, like, one of the things I tell people is things can just be true. Where especially so when you're talking to women, you'll say like a basic fact and then they'll go on like a five minute spiel about but this, but this, but this. And I'll say, okay, what I said is still true. Where there's this sort of like mental function of our society where they think if we just say shit for long enough, we can ultimately argue people into believing it's true. And I'm just sitting here like, no, you still did not disprove my argument. You just wasted my five minutes of my time.
Austin Padgett
Right. You can try and exhaust me and maybe that'll work with some people, but you're not actually shaking me off my frame of reference or engaging with the logical argument, which is very.
Rudyard Lynch
When I was in elementary school and this was like in third grade, it was absolutely insane where our teachers, parents and teachers were talking about college constantly when I was in third grade or when I was eight years old, and parents would talk about getting their kids into the right preschool so that if the kids weren't smart enough to get to the right, correct public private school, that they would be laundered to the preschool system when there was a lower. When there was a no actual intelligence threshold. And so people were talk obsessed with college when I was like in elementary school and I'm just very disappointed where they worked. A lot of people I knew in school to death working over 12 hours a day for years, where there was this girl in my high school who burst into tears in the hallway in freshman year because this was the first time she had an hour off in years. And it gave her an identity crisis. But the story I'm trying to reach here is that there was this. So they were pushing math really hard in elementary school, which just made me more resentful, where like they added an extra two hours of math curriculum, actually extra four hours of math curriculum every week in fourth grade to prepare us for the standardized test that our school's funding was based off. And then on top of it, they would have these like, pay. They'd have like an extra, like, they'd have extra math study programs and extra math homework and that stuff. I had hours of homework in elementary school, which I'm still angry about that's like creating a story's not done.
Austin Padgett
Yeah, go ahead. Okay.
Rudyard Lynch
In third grade the teacher said if you do an hour extra of math projects every week, I'm going to give you an ice cream party at the end of the year. And. And I told her that calculus doesn't make sense. You want me to expend like 50 hours of effort for an ice cream party? I'm not going to do that. Then she kept on trying to argue me into doing it every single session and I told her no. Then at the end of the year she said I could just do an extra history project and still get the ice cream party. And I'm like, I knew, I knew this would work. So 9 year old me knew that there was no self interest in me caving to this because I hated math.
Austin Padgett
It's like how much people can get other people to do with the offer of a pizza party or something. You're right. It doesn't equate at all to like a real transaction. And they're, it's like they're creating a fake economy right where they're. The school's funding is based on these test scores that don't actually mean anything towards like a productive thing in real life. So then they get all these students and they have them in their control and they work them really hard to get these test scores so that they can get funding and like this weird circular loop that means nothing. It is worse than like child labor because you're not actually getting anything productive out of it or getting paid.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, no Child Left Behind.
Austin Padgett
You don't get any of the school's money.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, no Child Left behind really screwed over my school where when I went to public school, no Child Left behind was the George Bush push to basically have standardized assessments of quality of schools so that schools could be held accountable. And what that did was that the schools had an incentive to get the grades high but not to actually teach things because they were only rewarded for getting the scores high. So what we would do is we have three months a year before the test. We're the only things that it was test prep. There wasn't information in the test, it wasn't books. We studied various hacking methods to read the system and to assess what are the types of questions the system asks because it wasn't actually a knowledge test. So we spent three to four months every year and the school year was like six months long. So half the school year just studying hacking systems and various assessment systems for this test. And that just completely wasted our Time, because that was time we weren't learning at the world. It was time that we weren't actually studying facts or reading real books. And that was my. That was every single year until sixth grade.
Austin Padgett
I thought of a really great business model around that because you mentioned the incentive structure doesn't line up with the kids. So they're always stressing, trying to promise him ice cream, like please, please do well, because our funding depends on this. But if you get funding for high scores, you'd only have to pay the kids probably like a very small fraction in order to incentivize higher scores. That would get you like a 20% higher funding for 5% of your overall budget. They would create a kid farm.
Rudyard Lynch
They would never do that because the schools are too longhoused. Actually that's a great transition for longhouse cultures, but where schools will never create meritocracy or competition because it gets rid of a facade of. Basically everyone gets along because you need to maintain.
Austin Padgett
I was making a joke too, but because you're paying the students for nothing. But yeah, go ahead.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think, I think paying kids, kids to study in school extra hard is actually a great idea. I think if you paid kids who got good grades, I don't know, 100 bucks a month, that would radically increase the incentive for the kids to go to school. But it's really hard to map or to understand the nature of sex over history. Partly because historic societies don't really record this that well where there's these gaps in our frame of knowledge. Especially when we study the pre industrial world, where as an example, we tend to think most of history was significantly more sexually prude than it was because people didn't record the sex stuff because that was not what they wrote about. They would. Most historic societies write religious documents, kings, conquering stuff and merchant documents. And in only a few societies do you get people's private correspondences or their just letters to each other. In the last thousand years, there's a lot more prevalence of those personal documents. You find a good amount of it in the ancient world or then you'll have certain places like Islam. I'm reading a book on medieval Islam. The records on Persia, even a thousand years ago aren't great. And for the medieval period as an example, which we'll ultimately get to for all the societies, actually they were significantly more sexual than we think because that's just how human nature works. And the industrial revolution has been a huge force against, I would call humanization. And that's something where we don't really think about it. And it's a, it's a bias in how we record where we tend to think our ancestors were significantly stuffier than they were because we're reading the records, we're not actually seeing our daily lived experience. And another example is women tend to have. Every society ever in history is a patriarchy. There's just no matriarchies. You have more feminine style patriarchies or like longhouse societies, but it's still the men who are in charge. In like the longhouse societies, but consistently, women had significantly more social influence than, than people tend to think. Whereas an example the most in sheer terms of male power, the great Asian civilizations are the most patriarchal societies ever. Where Islam, India, China, before European colonialism, they basically, at least in legal terms, women had no rights. They were barely allowed to leave the house. If they were complete male patriarchy. In India or a lot of those societies, women weren't supposed to eat at the same dinner table as men and women were. In Japan, women are supposed to step behind men. Then you actually look at these societies and in Indian families, it's often the mom who, Indian families have this sort of meme where it's just this completely overbearing mother who just bullies the husband and the children. And in China, if you meet Chinese moms, there's no joke. They're, they're. Chinese moms are no joke. They're, they're, they're a dangerous life form. And I, and I know this having had many Chinese friends where their, their moms are just really hard driving. And the sexes exist in this very strange situation where they have to fight each other and they have to, so they, the sexes fight each other because they have different self interests. Men and women do not have the same self interests, but they also have to cooperate together to raise families and to have society. And they're also. The genetic differences in men and women are significantly greater than between races. And there's multiple ways to measure that. If you measure it in like PCA chart terms, a white man and a white woman are significantly genetically closer than a black person or an Asian. But when you look at biological difference, the difference between the most genetically different races of humans at a million years, men and women bisected, I would guess a billion years ago or hundreds of millions of years ago. So you have a very long period where it's, it's almost as if you have two civilizations forced to live in the same house, forced to have children together, which see the world on A neurological and physiological basis in very different ways. And then also the sexes have to fight. But in order for the sexual ritual to end, men have to win. Sex only occurs when the men and the woman fight and the man overpowers the woman. And this is why feminists like to say that sex is an innately patriarchal act. Because one of. One of them, how many blunt One of them fucks, another one gets fucked. And that's the nature of men and women physiologically. It's acting in being. And so I think there's just a series of sort of divine ironies in how men and women have to relate to each other that are just piled on top of each other. You have two people who are very similar yet very different, who have to fight each other, but one side has to win and who. Who appear as if they live in the same civilization, but also perceive the world and irreconcilable ways.
Austin Padgett
So you have this sexual breakdown in society. And I wonder if a lot of the. The lack of understanding about the potential of higher frequencies is attached to the breakdown of sexual relations. Because when you have a culture in which you can't have that ultimate resolution in the relationship, then instead of like, frequencing up off of each other, you're stuck in this, like, chaotic plane in which you can't distinguish it as having any additional value from another relationship. And even people make jokes about like, well, at least if like, you're dating a dude or something, he understands he won't be crazy. Or like the hot crazy matrix chart where they say if it's a nine hot and. And one crazy. It's like, oh, sorry, that's a.
Rudyard Lynch
So yeah, the hot crazy matrix is useful because I would say that attractive women are crazier than ugly women. It's. I think they're equivalently crazy. It's just we don't think about ugly women as much. There's plenty of crazy ugly women who are. Who are just single. But the more attractive you are, the more you can get away with insanity and just bad behavior. And so the relation between the sexes is oppositional. And basically the way to reconcile the opposition between the sexes is to make your men as manly as possible. And so the societies which treat women best are the most masculine warrior societies like the Romans or the Americans or the Iroquois or the Vikings, which were all societies, which are the Spartans, which all gave women significant authority. And it's interesting that the. There's anthropological, psychological femininity and masculinity. The societies which treat Women the worst are the psychologically feminine societies, which is. It's the joke that goes. The people who hate women, the mo. Women understand women and they dislike each other. And so the societies which treat women the best are the most psychologically masculine, because once the men are masculine, they just do stuff and they're not threatened by the women. So the women can have a greater share of the society because the men are masculine enough to set the frame. And so the way I see this is you have psychologically masculine societies, psychologically feminine societies, then you have negative constellations of both sides and the positive constellations, so the most negative constellation is a society where the men are irresponsible and the women are basically shrews. The men, the men are irresponsible and the women are irresponsible. And these sorts of societies. As an example, Thailand. Thailand was a slave society for most of its history, where until the 19th century, three quarters of ties were slaves or serfs who were so close to slaves they were nigh. They were nigh distinguishable. And so when you have this slave society where men need to take responsibility to be sexually attractive to women and to grow out their personalities, in a slave society, there's no responsibility. And so the men hang around and drink and fight each other and waste their money, and then the women aren't attracted to the men. And so Thailand is one of the most psychologically feminine societies where women have a huge influence. Southeast Asia is probably the society in the world that's most psychologically feminine. And it's also the only Asian civilization where it's the Asian civilization that gives women the best treatment. Although it's not one, it's significantly worse than the West. The west is by far the society which has treated women the best. And then the most positive constellation of this is like the Vikings, where the Vikings had masculine men. But if you read the sagas, lots of Viking women have very strong personalities. Lots of. If you. The sagas are, are. Are stories where women are fully integrated into the society. And because the Vikings set such a masculine frame. So the answer to evolution is always to be a chad. If there's an evolutionary question, and I do not say I always follow this rule, I am merely stating it as a Platonic ideal that if there's a question of what is the most evolutionarily correct answer, the most evolutionary collect. Evolutionarily correct answer is always to pick the chadliest answer, which is why warrior peoples conquer the world and why intrepid explorers and scientists and that stuff are the ones who create breakthroughs where. Because the negative and the positive constellation is the way to get the best dimorphism between both sexes is to increase masculinity and the masculine frame.
Austin Padgett
Right. Because like you said, it's the scaffold or whatever for the space. And then the. What's. The. What's the opposite of. Of that?
Rudyard Lynch
It's just being a cuck. So I'm not gonna.
Austin Padgett
Which is. Yeah.
Rudyard Lynch
Because the cuck is a man who does not establish frame. And then the woman gets dissatisfied and then goes to another man. So everyone in this equation is failing.
Austin Padgett
Oh, yeah. I was gonna say, you saying that's the most. Masculinity is the most important thing is the reason why people who are against life or civilization are obsessed with toxic masculinity.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
Austin Padgett
Because if you define it, if you can define masculinity as toxic, you can stop all life in its tracks.
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. One of the points Amalri Durian Corps makes, which is very wise, is he said. He said feminism is the outgrowth of a psychologically masculine society that women bought into, where what the left and modernism does is it forces every life form to declare war against itself. Men can't be men. Women can't be women. White people can't be white people. The upper classes can't be upper class. The lower classes can't be lower class. Religious people can't be religious. And it's interesting. I'd actually. I'd consider making Our next history102 on the Age of the Last Men is. It's been one of my recent obsessions, but when I was growing up, I thought our society's moral code was highly tolerant and highly open and fluid. But what I realized is that the underlying nature of our social code is that whatever you are, you should not be okay with it. And that's just terrible. It's a horrible way to live, and it's deeply unreasonable. Where what feminism tells women is your natural intuitions, your natural desires are wrong. You need to go in the exact opposite direction in order to obtain approval. And so feminism tells women to act like men. And so it tells them, if you go in direct opposition to what you want, that's good. But what that symbolizes is actually a very profound degree of misogyny. I actually think the left dislikes women more than the right.
Austin Padgett
Yeah, that makes. That makes sense psychologically. And it also. It tells you. They tell you unnatural things are natural while telling you that natural things are wrong.
Rudyard Lynch
Anthropologically, female psychological happiness tends to stem from strong social Connections, strong social connections, are the dominant predictor for happiness across humans. It's even more so for women. And so when you're looking at the feminist, as feminism grew, women's general happiness crashed precipitously, which is a statistically obvious trend in every single thing you'd look at. Women are significantly less happy now than they were 50 years ago. And what you're seeing here is you can view a lot of feminism as the Industrial Revolution. Very much damaged women psychologically, because the two factors that make people happiest in general are community and religion. This is why people in the third world are poor, but they're often happier than first worlders because they got community and religion down. And the death of community and religion hurt women, especially because they're more psychologically dependent upon those than men are. What feminism did was take the agitation, shove it in the exact wrong direction, so that as women pushed further along, they would in turn make their own misery worse. And then that would give them more psychic energy to keep pushing the process along, where it's like Jormungandr eating its own tail.
Austin Padgett
Right. Because everything that feminism is doing is destroying community and religion.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, because what feminism prizes is feminism prizes women trying to get the things men want. And there's a real confusion going on here where one of the effects of mouse utopia, and I don't like that I'm talking so much about modernity for sex. But we have to, because in order to understand the past, we have to unpack what our society is incorrect in. Our society is so fundamentally incorrect on this issue, we're going to have to cut through a lot of jungle to get to the road. And so that's why we're going through the neurological issues modernity faces in this regard before we study history, because only through seeing our biases can we see the people in history as they were. But mouse utopia makes you realize how much of basic human survival is the passing on of traditions and cultures. Where this is a huge division between our sexual understandings in the past, where people in the past sexual understandings were built up by all of these implicit traditions which were passed on. These tended to not actually be written down in a sort of autistic, philosophic way. They were done implicitly. And so we didn't record these. The Industrial revolution killed them. And so that meant that we just don't have them. So we're stuck trying to artificially recreate a culture in order to survive, because you had all of these customs. Like, just as an example, in Early America, the way they would do dating is they had a practice called bundling, where they would take a man and woman, wrap them in a blanket and then wrap them together at night they couldn't sleep, they couldn't have sex with each other, but they still had to talk to each other to see if they got along well in bed. And what that's symbolic for is that was part of a broader process where you had, I think America got rid of dowries pretty fast. But you had dowries, you had expectations for what a husband and a wife would be like. You had systems, you had the balls where for upper class people, they'd throw specific social events to have members of the other sex meet. You had until the 20th century in America, in most of the world, men and women actually spent very little time together. Where most pre industrial understandings of marriage was that this is a specific deal where we take care of the kids, we manage the household, and we have sex. Which is why they prioritized things like social class or religion or culture. Because their idea is this is a sort of transaction where because we have the shared values and shared genetics, we can probabilistically make an outcome of a certain child. Where the reason that pre industrial societies didn't like class mixing was that inside populations you have certain psychological distributions which occur naturally. Where John Keegan, a military historian, says a normal society takes people who have the natural psychological disposition to be soldiers and then has them fight. And there's a certain subset, let's say 5% of the population who like war, and they go crazy when they don't have it. In a normal society, those people meet up, they mate together. And so when you mix two of these people together, the statistical chances the kid is going to like war, especially with parents where that's their occupation, is pretty high. So social class and mating around social class was a sort of quality control for a society that didn't have a strong state, it didn't have strong regulatory systems and that stuff. And, and what John Keegan says is that war gets really ugly and people get resentful of it when people who do not naturally have the warrior psychological disposition are shoved into combat, which is why we built up such resentment from the world wars. But you don't see it in the medieval or the early modern worlds which had constant war. But the point I'm trying to convey here is that with mouse utopia in the Industrial Revolution, you are seeing the breakdown of all of these sort of implicit social traditions that allowed humans to mate and to survive. Because they weren't really written down. But the social shifts were so rapid that we lost them faster than we can figure out what the purpose of those traditions were.
Austin Padgett
Right. Even the technological constraints that influenced how these social events were carried out disappeared. And then you didn't have the impetus to reform them very well. In a modern context, I guess prom spreading throughout America is kind of like a very light attempt at some sort of matchmaking, normalcy or control of the relations. Because a lot of times proms are set up to stop people from drinking off campus.
Rudyard Lynch
Prom was.
Austin Padgett
Yeah, go ahead.
Rudyard Lynch
Prom was a promenade dance. And promenade was an upper class social institution where when an upper class girl came of basically mating age, age 18, sometimes earlier, 21, she would throw a party or her family would throw a party. So all the eligible men would come in and she'd socialize with them. Same thing as the ball. Where in early modern England, from, let's say English Civil War until World war, World War II, you had an institution called the London Season, where if you were of a certain social class, you would go to London in the summer and they would have constant, nonstop. There were parties like they weren't dancing and having disco, but people were drinking, they were dancing. And so this was a social institution which existed so you could just drop your children off there and then they'd meet a mate. And this was part of the social understanding of the time. And so you had lots of social institutions like that. And there's multiple tiered steps here. So the culture of dating and premarital sex is actually significantly older than a lot of people think. It easily goes back to the Middle Ages where a thousand years ago people, normal middle class people in the 11th century still married out of love. They would. There was an idea that you'd sleep around and if you got a girl pregnant, you would, you would marry her where you're kind of testing fertility. And with that, the nobility and the lowest social classes kept arranged marriages significantly nor significantly normalized because for them it was a property interaction. So the higher your social class, Until World War I, the monarchs had arranged marriages in Europe where the normal people had centuries earlier stopped them. And so that culture, which we tend to see as a very modern thing, is quite old. And even in the Roman period, Ovid, one of the writers, he wrote the Ars Amatory, which is a pickup artist guide to first century Rome. He says, pick up girls in the bath houses, because that's where everyone was nude and hanging out. Don't take, don't take a girl. If she's too drunk. Find ways to evade her parents. Where these young Romans, they were sleeping around without their parents consent in a sort of way you'd see in a 1950s high school. And you still had arranged marriages in the Roman Empire. And so you have these more sort of like flexible family notions. Where one of the huge differences in the pre industrial world and the modern world is in the pre industrial world the family was the dominant economic unit. And you have to view sex to that lens where the husband was the sole proprietor of the family farm. Because almost all people in the pre industrial world were independent farmers. They were often, their land was often run by a landlord, but they did the farming themselves. So when you look at the pre industrial societies and people live these very hard lives with relatively high life satisfaction, the reason was that their entire difficult life was spent with friends and family. So that changed their perception of the world. And having to deal with strangers all the time, I think has done given modernity severe psychological issues where we can't, we've lost the friend enemy distinction. Which is why countries don't make sense, families don't make sense, religions don't make sense. Because in modernity having no friend enemy distinction is actually an evolutionary advantage. Because almost all of your social interactions are with strangers. The nicer you are to strangers, the more you get rewarded. Which is why our society's moral code is obsessed with virtue signaling to strangers. Because we're an anonymous society. And so when you read about people say that people in the past were less emotional, they didn't have emotions. That's not true. In fact, they were significantly more emotional than us. We're probably one of the least, we concentrate all of our emotion into hysteria. Besides that, we don't have that many emotions. But the reasoning that pre industrial people didn't talk about emotions was their entire social network was friends and family. So you would just say what you're thinking and people in your network would trust you. And there was this built in intimacy into the social structure. Today we talk about emotions and authenticity and these things because the big issue with industrial civilization is pushing back against the dehumanization of the machine. And so you couldn't disentangle sex in the pre industrial world from family, from town, from religion, where it was all intermeshed in this web of social relationships. And so the dating, dating culture is significantly older than we think, although they called it courtship. And your parents would be watching and there were these established rituals and stuff. And then you saw the rise of, there was a shift in the early 20th century, which ultimately resulted in the sexual revolution and the current equilibrium.
Austin Padgett
They didn't talk about emotions because they were living it. And we talk about emotions all the time because we're kind of cut off from them and abstracting them. It's, it has to, it relates to the relationship thing too because when you have like so many relationships it probably is like talking to strangers versus family. It's so exhausting to try and like get to know someone again on an intimate level. Like when I was a kid, I moved every one or two years until I was 11 and eventually I just stopped caring about making friends at school in the same way. Like I'm not going to make an investment if I unless I know I'm going to be here three years.
Rudyard Lynch
I think I moved like, I think I moved like 13 times before I turned age 15. So it's a similar dynamic.
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Rudyard Lynch
Special offer@oracle.com cognitive that's oracle.com cognitive so if you read pre industrial sources, they don't have the modernist concept of objectivity. And that really matters because most people, most modernist people have this very sort of warped, weird concept of objectivity. So they'll say like if you have a religious worldview that's not objective, objectivity is just sticking with the facts. But what they almost always do is plug in a religious worldview and then they're completely dishonest about it. And if you push them on it, they're just going to lie about what their neurological process is where they actually believe in the God of progress, but they'll pretend to have objectivity. And so as an example, I do history content in a personable way. The way I write is that I imagine I'm talking to the sharpest kid in your high school. When I think of the whatifalthist audience, I think of my target audience is the sharpest guy in a high school. And that means there's a significant amount of mental horsepower in the person. But they haven't had their worldview formed by college. They don't know all the fancy terms, but if you can explain it, they have the horsepower to understand what you're saying. And so it fits for a wide scale audience. But academics have been told for decades to not write in personable or interesting ways because that's bias. If you write about your life story, if you write about your, your. The relationship of how people perceive consciousness versus other people, that's considered bias. So if you talk about like different tiers of consciousness and different strengths and weaknesses, and what the bias worldview leads to is basically you have to support Marxism because you can never say any one worldview is better than another. You'll first of all say, oh, we can't judge anyone. And then because we can't judge anyone, we have to support Marxism because everyone's equal. If we can't judge anyone. And if because everyone's equal, everyone equals Marxism, none of it makes sense. It's still the logical line they draw. And what this is kind of symbolic for, and this thing I think about a lot where the reason we're having a mating crisis now is that sex was the last thing we had left that was human in the society. And when you remove all of the other buttressing humanizing forces, it means there isn't the cultural capital to keep mating going. Where we removed community, we removed religion, we removed art, we removed culture, we removed every single cultural force that would humanize us and allow us to express our humanity. What that did was it dehumanized everyone in the society to a horrifying degree. And so when you're, when you're looking at, let's say, a lot of Gen Z guys, and this was the culture I actively left, where they'll say, oh, like their attitudes are get rich and get laid. But that so stripped away their humanity as an individual that people have lost the ability to interact with others in a normal, normal, healthy, human way. Which is why we're seeing social breakdown and social suicide. Because when you're looking at the suicide of The West. It's a reflection of the breakdown of the ties of society inside the culture, which gets people to resent the society and want to destroy it. And then they project all of this through politics. Politics has become a mechanism where you can project all of your insecurities about the world onto it. The. The problem though is most of the issues hurting our society are not political. They're cultural, they're religious, they're human capital, they're economic. But politics is this. Is this handy basically cop out.
Austin Padgett
About to which where you can express this.
Rudyard Lynch
And it's a cop out for not having to take responsibility for the complexity of the human condition. All of politics, someone else in power is going to take responsibility. For me, the reality is that we have to build our own communities. We have to take care of our own people. And the things that really matter in life. Where I'm not going to politics does matter. Politics matters especially for quality of life, for national greatness. But there are things. All of the political obsession is a way to abdicate responsibility over your own personal life. Where. When I look at. When I was in high school, I was thinking about how come. Because I moved from a rural area to an urban area. And I went from how come the new urban society I live in looks down on earnestness? Because where I grew up, you were expected to be earnest. You were expected to like it was a culture. And I was trying to figure out why did I move from a culture that prizes earnestness to one where it's mocked and the conclusion. And it got me thinking, wait. Because I grew up in a Christian background. I went to church, I had. My parents were Christian, but they also had their own philosophic concepts. So I went from a culture where the biggest thing I was told how to do was how to basically self moderate my own internal state, which is what religion is, to one where you're always talking about what people in power can do for you. So I was stuck thinking about that shift. Hi. Should I say his name? It's. It's. It's Austin's baby.
Austin Padgett
Sorry, a little babysitter revolt there.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
Austin Padgett
So I'm gonna grab the last thing you said.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. What? So when I was a teenager, I moved from a rural to an urban area and I went from a culture that really prized earnestness to one where it was mocked. So once this culture shock, thinking how come the new culture I'm in views earnestness with contempt? And it's because the modernist project is abdicating responsibility over your personal life. So that Someone in authority can make your life better for you. The implicit assumption in the modernist project is that politics and legislation determines the character of a country or a people. In reality, their character determines their character, their intelligence, their kindness, their hard workingness. Where a people of good character can have a failed state, where medieval France, early modern Germany and said failed state is still one of the most advanced places in the world, one of the most competitive places in the world. But if a population lacks character, it lacks the ability to build the government in the first place.
Austin Padgett
Yes. And then it takes on kind of more of the social responsibility until it collapses.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
Austin Padgett
All right.
Rudyard Lynch
So when you try to compare the modern Western world to the rest of world history, there's two different historic events which radically separate us. So I'm going to start with what separates the west, the modern west, from the rest of history's sexual norms. And then actually there's three things I can think of what separate the modern west from the rest of history is sexual norms. Then we're going to start with the Stone Age and then progress forward to go through. There's a. Chris Dawson has terms of. He says there's the religion of the hunter, the religion of the farmer, the religion of the city dweller, the warrior, the empire, and I'm going to add the industrial. So I'm going to go through how each of the cultural manifestations associated with those six things affected the relationships between men and women. Because I believe in the craft. And so three cultural shifts which separate the modern west from the rest of history. The first one was what I called the Western Revolution, which separates European peoples from non European peoples. Where all of the societies which treated women the best in history were European. European treats women several standard deviations better than any other society. And the only competitors I know of are the Native Americans of the modern U.S. even Native Americans of Mexico and South America treated women very terribly. But the Cherokee and the Iroquois treated women quite well. The Comanche treated them very poorly. Where the Comanche would like, physically torture and maim women for fun. And that's also correlated with individualism, where one of the best cultural practices for women is individualism. And it's interesting, feminists talk about these matriarchal clan societies where ancestry is measured through the female line. But interestingly, matriarchal societies actually frequently treat women quite poorly because the women become commodities because the ancestral line is measured through them. You treat women like commodities to trade them for the financial stuff they bring. So that you have matriarchal peoples in India or Southeast Asia that are like that. Todd Emanuel talks about it. And the individual is very good for women. Because when you're in the Klan society and practically all cultures except Europeans are clan societies where Europe broke out of the clan with the rise of Christianity at the latest we have more archeological and anthropology anthropological proof that the pagan Celts and German were also individualist. But in the clan society, the women involved are pawns for the clan elders. Where if you're the pater familias of a clan in China or India or Russia, which have the same clan structure where a single man dominates an entire extended family. And I lived in a clan compound like this in Peru where there was a doctor and he had six children and they lived in this walled compound and they would. They all work different jobs, they're part of the same extended family. And I could tell it made them happy where they'd throw parties all the time. They had a wide scale support social network. If one of them had financial issues otherwise would help them. They lived together. I would just never want to live like that. I want to live as an individual. It's just how I am. And it's also how societies tend to work better. Where in the clan, all of the women involved, with the exception of the clan mother. Lots of these societies have very strong clan mothers. They treat the women like pawns. Where because it's this centralized command, if you're the fourth granddaughter, you're just going to get married off to a local family for the strategic interests of your clan father. And with individualism. Where in part of the Western European tradition is that when a man comes of age, he moves out and starts his own family. Especially this is especially so pronounced for the Anglo Saxon family structure. Where Anglo Saxon societies going back to the period of the fall of Rome, you could only mate and you can only start a family. We can have your own farm. You have to go out of the house and build yourself yourself. In the rest of Europe you had some of that attitude. But also the parents were expected to financially support the children. And in individualist structures it's a singular negotiation between the man and the woman. Where husband owns the farm and he has to treat his wife as an economic proprietor in the clan. He's dependent on her for sex, raising the family for all those things. And in the clan structure, the husband works with his male relatives as the financial business. The women are shoved together in these clan communities where they do women's work together and scheme. And so it's interesting that whenever feminists say the society they want, they say communitarian, collectivist, strong emotional ties, safety net. I'm thinking you're describing Islam. Whenever feminists or the handmaiden's tale or something. Exactly. Whenever feminists tug at their ideal society. You can I mentally test this every single time. All of the adjectives fit Islam. And the funny thing is that the kinds of societies that feminists say they want are unilaterally societies which treat women terribly. Because what you've had when you have this communitarian, traditional, safety net society because women are trying to prioritize safety and fluidity and the ability to be irresponsible is said societies treat women terribly because they're always built around tradition and hierarchy.
Austin Padgett
And what you describe the relationship with the one woman who acts kind of like the mama, son or whatever the English word is for head. Head woman of a prostitute house.
Rudyard Lynch
That's a matron.
Austin Padgett
Matron, right. Yeah. She's acting like the matron over the other girls and then selecting who they go with or who they're. And this, that kind of culture feeds directly into prostitution, not only in a symbolic way, but a real way because women are sold from rural areas by their families which are managed in the way that you described.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, historically the line between prostitution, marriage and concubine edge was fairly thin. And it's. You can make a snarky statement about that today too where the natural world is brutal and it's. You have to do stuff to survive. We have this attitude today that you can just be given. I frequently think of this. I don't know why I use this mental image in my mind but growing up my family showed us a lot of English television and English shows. And so I had, I would watch both the English and the American shows and they always go back to late 19th century Britain or late 19th century America as this like homely archetype where there's these, like these mud brick, these mud brick houses with a stay at home wife, the husband goes to work, the kids have toys and they always treat this as like a comfortable baseline to default back onto. The reality is that comfortable baseline was built off the greatest empire in history with insane technological wizardry built off this thousands of year old religious philosophic concept. And this is the mental disjoint. I see our society in a very hyper feminized feeling form makes is there's no comprehension that the stability of our current society is built off war and chaos in hierarchy in insane. Like we live in the science fiction timeline and we can't Go back where there's this sort of psychological desire to return to Eden, where you look at the left and the left is built off these Russoian concept of the noble savage, which is just a rationalization for the return to Eden, which is the left is basically saying, let's make a collective agreement to return to Eden, but you're not allowed to do that. And there's been this attempt to build a myth of these matriarchal societies before the rise of the Iron Age, where there was a historic event called the Masculine Revolution, which is just. I love that name. The Masculine Revolution, which Amori talks about was a thousand BC Rise of Brahminism in India, which later evolved into Hinduism and Buddhism. You have the Zhou Dynasty establishing the mandate of heaven, which ultimately created the modern Chinese state. The rise of the Greek heroic, which later became the rational tradition, the Jewish monotheistic tradition, and Zoroastrianism. So a thousand BC after the fall of the Bronze Age was a period where objectivity as a concept developed. And one of the things Amori speaks about and I. I often imagine myself dueling very smart authors. Like we're dueling each other, and I'm trying to get information out of them without allowing them to pollute my worldview or with ideas I did not consent to. And very smart authors trick you where you'll notice that they got you to believe an idea which you didn't actually believe. They were just a good author. And so Amori says that people before the Masculine Revolution didn't have a concept that the male semen was required to impregnate a woman. They. They believed in sort of the. And we'll talk about this more. The sort of mystery of the divine, creative feminine. And I personally do not believe that. I think I respect Amaury. He is right a lot. I think it is physically impossible for humans to not realize you need semen to birth a child. But it speaks to this sort of archetypal period called the Archaic period in anthropological documents, where the Archaic period was after the development of agriculture and before the rise of the Masculine revolution with objectivity. We're in this worldview. Mankind's part of nature. We're part of this natural cycle that we can't break out of, where we are part of Mother Nature's plan, which is an innately very feminine universe where you ultimately submit. Yes. And you ultimately submit to Mother Nature and you can't fight back. The Masculine revolution across Eurasia was no. Humans are going to develop objectivity and fight back against nature and win so feminists have tried to make the argument, and this stems to Rousseau, that before the masculine revolution were these paradises of matriarchal governance with worship of Mother Nature. And part of the. That's just incorrect. Where Mother Nature is not a nice goddess. Um, she's stupid and evil. And yes, she is the underlying force which powers all creativity. But all of the Mother Nature cults involve, like Sibyl and Anatolia, they would crush the testicles of the priests involved because Mother Nature had to castrate people in New guinea in one of the Mother Nature cults. Actually, I apologize for calling Mother Nature evil. She's amoral. There's a difference. Mother Nature doesn't have a concept of morality. She just spawns stuff out and is the constant creativity of life. And you can't get rid of Mother Nature, but you have to tame her enough for your own purposes, because if you don't tame Mother Nature, she's going to keep punching you until you die.
Austin Padgett
And that fits with your conception of the masculine female relation.
Rudyard Lynch
So Mother Nature cults in New guinea, another example, is that every, like every once in a while, every few years or something, they crash a young man and woman together inside the external mask of this tree to crush their bones and to crush their body as a fertility offering to Mother Nature. And whenever you see Mother Nature cults, you're seeing this very primal, this very primitive notion of natural justice. And when I say natural justice, I mean natural injustice. These cultures tend to view the world in a very zero sum way. So you have to sacrifice humans to get the nature to reward you. And this is the archaic state, and it's psychologically feminine. But these were largely not societies that treated women well. Where. So Africa, as an example. Africa. And the Native Americans never left the archaic phase. And in African societies, physical labor was seen as women's work. Women were the ones who did the farming because they were farming with hoes. Women were the ones who took care of the kids. And so in traditional African culture, the men fought each other, herded cows and drank while the women did the work. And they would beat the women to work faster and so that they farm with hoes. Exactly. I set that joke up on purpose. And the Native Americans had a lot of. Some Native American peoples treated women very well, others did not. The Comanche had a similar dynamic to the Africans. The Yanomani people are a great example of this, where anthropologists have a tendency to glorify indigenous peoples. And they'll say that these indigenous peoples have the values approximate to like A Berkeley student. They're egalitarian, they're feminist, peaceful, at one with nature, and unilaterally. None of that is true. Native peoples are always violent and hierarchical and misogynistic. It's just a degree and it's hard to measure. Whereas an example in Central Asia, there was a period where the Muslims were more feminist than the pagans. There was another period where that the roles were flipped. But then you had other groups where, like a certain group of pagans treated women worse, another than the tribe next to it treated women better. And I'm using Central Asia as an example to show that the treatment of men and women varies a lot by particular context. The social class, the era of history, the area. And so the Yanomani people in the upper reaches of the Amazon and the Orinoco Basin, they. It's funny because anthropology textbooks use them as examples of a peaceful people. The Yana money have one of the highest death rates in war of any people ever, with over 40% of men dying each generation. War. The Yanomani were also anthropologists said they were feminist. And in Yanomani culture, if your husband doesn't beat you until you're blue, he doesn't love you, because if he's not beating you enough, it shows he doesn't care. And so women show off their bruises to each other. And it's an example of a just. First of all, it's an example of anthropologists lying to a completely insane degree. But also it's an example of how sexual norms always have a degree of impracticality on purpose, where the reason you drive a sports car or you're jacked is these are things that require either lots of costs of time and effort or of money. And so the sexual force is always a force for impracticality. And so when you see something demonstratively impractical, like a huge palace or the potlatches, which is in. In the Pacific peoples of the Northwest, in the natives of the northwestern US they would burn their possessions periodically as a sign of their wealth. They'd get possessions, then burn them as a social thing whenever you see mass. Things like that, assume it's a sexual signaling mechanism, like a peacock having huge plumes.
Austin Padgett
Right. In Egypt and parts of the Middle east, they will bring you a ridiculous amount of food, like more food for five people, just to, like, show off. It's a signaling mechanism that's wasteful. Might relate in some way. But I was wondering, like, who are you to say the Yamna, Donnie, are not feminist because what you describes with the bruises and shouting out the bruises sounds awfully lot like the most popular female novel in America. Fifty Shades of Gray.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
Austin Padgett
Who are you to tell them how to live their lives?
Rudyard Lynch
Gray did not abuse them that much. Okay, so. Well, I watched, I watched the first movie. I never read the books. I was bored. It's actually a profoundly boring movie. It radiates zero sexuality. It's pretty boring. Not much risque actually occurs. In France it was given a 12 and up rating and they said that even a 12 and upbringing might be too PC for it. They said that you could probably. The French media said you could probably show this movie to a 10 year old and it would be fine. Which just, it speaks to. That's just like a. That's a French people moment.
Austin Padgett
Right. It's a funny. But I get your point. Yeah.
Rudyard Lynch
And it's also terribly written. God. But.
Austin Padgett
So, but the point is, if you make a feminine cult or a Mother Nature cult, don't assume it's going to be run by women.
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. Yeah. And Western Europe, they had their own social revolution around sexual norms. There's a thing called the Hajnow Line. The Hajnow Line's famous in anthropology circles where it is this line where the vast majority of innovations in the world in the last 500 years come within the Hajnah line. It's Britain, but not Ireland. The northern part of Spain and Italy, inside France, Germany, Scandinavia and so this circle in western central Europe is where most creativity took place. In the studies of the Hajnah line found the reason is that it had later mating patterns. Where in the last thousand years of European history, the average age of marriage has not fluctuated at all. Where in 1970 the average age of marriage in America was 22 to 24. In 1950 it was 20 years old. So half of the population got married under the age of 20 in 1950, which is just insane. And the reasoning for that is the ability to mate is a function of scarcity. So in the 50s, when there was a lot of good jobs, where I hear stories, I heard stories of like cashiers at grocery stores buying houses in the 50s and starting families. And in the good periods of the Middle Ages that was the case too. Where you'll get married age 20. In the bad periods of the Middle Ages, the average age of marriage was 30, right before the Black Death.
Austin Padgett
Wow.
Rudyard Lynch
Marriage now is over 30. So the west has kept a constant average state of marriage for over a thousand years. And we don't think about it because what we've done is we've coped that the increasing average age of marriage is not a function of scarcity. We coped. It's a sign of feminism. It's a sign of progress. And I think a lot of feminism is just people coping that they financially cannot support two families. They cannot financially support themselves off of one, off a one worker household. So they're going to say that it's empowering for both parents to work. And it's a chicken and egg thing. That's part of the reason why it's hard to have a single income family. But it's also. It's a factor totally.
Austin Padgett
And then is there's a dissatisfaction with the ability for men to attract mates through demonstrating that responsibility through opportunities within this society.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that is correct. That's a good point too. And because women are sexually attracted to polarity, where as a woman's income gets higher, the man she wants to be sexually attractive also gets higher. Which is why most societies in history put men and women in different brackets. Because first of all, intra female sexual competition is brutal. Where I grew up, part of the women were stay at home moms and part of them were working moms. And they hated each other. They'd wear different clothes, they'd stare at each other at the grocery store, they would refuse to talk to each other, they'd be mean to each other. I'm thinking, can't you respect other women making different choices? But that's not how female social networks work. And so once there's a sort of norm in the female psyche, they force conformity among everyone involved. So that's why we move from a society where the expectation was you got married and had kids to one where women actively bully those who choose to be mothers. It's often a quite large amount of bullying too. And especially so among people my age, where I've gone out with multiple girls, where they were kind of short circuiting between the biological wiring and the corporate wiring, where they had huge amounts of corporate things. You have to work. It's not that you want to. This is the set path. You have to be a good feminist. But then they also have the biological wiring. And the other thing as well is that when men and women compete with each other, men can't treat women as Darwinistic players, even though we're told to, where you can't tell a woman if they do a job incorrectly. You fucking idiot. You need to fix this now or we're all gonna die. That's seen as cruel, even if it's in a context where it's actually true or you can't. For men their role is to be Darwinistic players and just go full throttle. And so for women you have an issue where if you treat them as Darwinistic players, you have to give them a certain degree of leeway, but also you can't. And then there's a disjoint about that. But also if you mix them up as sort of operating and if you mix men and women in the same spaces too much, then you're going to get into these sort of evolutionary pressures where the high status women will not be able to find any men they find attractive. And so outside the Hajonal line is the rest of the world. And inside the Hashinol line the average date of marriage was like 20 to 30. And then in the rest of the world you would have a 20, a nearly 30 year old man marry a 15 year old girl. In the Middle east, in India or China you would get a girl at age 15 and then marry her off to an older man. And the older man would sleep with prostitutes or do stuff like that to sexually keep himself going until he was financially independent enough as an older man to take a younger, a younger wife. And this feeds into a lot of why Europe had higher social status for women than the rest of the world. Because in Europe there was the expectation of a much smaller age gap, like, let's say five to seven years. In the rest of the world it could be a 15 year age gap. So you're taking a woman who's a child and then giving her to a significantly older man because her role is reproductive. And in Europe we've developed the cultural attitude that women can have value apart from reproduction because the European character gives the human soul value independently from its social context. The rest of the world doesn't do that. In Asia, if you're upper class, you have the social value of an upper class person. If you're lower class, the social value of what? That of a lower class person. If you're a woman, you have your reproductive value. And that's a downstream effect of I think Christianity and the Greeks. So you have let's say the Western sexual revolution which was caused individualism. Then the second. I'm going to go through three. The second sexual revolution which separates the modern west from the rest of human sexuality is what I'm going to call the civility revolution. And the civility revolution. It stems from the Evolution of Manners which was one of my mom's favorite books she recommended to Me. The Evolution of Manners is an anthropological study on the rise of manners over Western history. And it's fascinating is it starts in the Middle Ages and it ends with the 20th century. And you really see the medieval world differently because our external understanding of the medieval period is they were super prude, they were super Christian, they were super stuck up. But you look at medieval records and this was, I'm just going to call it like a filthy society, a visceral society where nights, and it wasn't just sex. Knights would write poetry about how much they loved the act of killing. People would carve up animal carcasses in front of others at the dinner table. There was no privacy, so people would just take a dump in the living room in chamber pots. And so it was a significantly more sexually loose society than today, where medieval people had more loose understandings of. They had significantly looser understandings of privacy than we do. Where even in the Puritan period, in the early modern period, people would just have sex in front of each other. In colonial America, it was completely normal to walk across your town and to see your neighbors fucking in their fields. Because this was a study that, you know, no concept of privacy. And so in medieval Europe, as an example, it was socially taboo for a wife to not sleep with her husband naked in bed, because the idea was that her husband owned the sexuality of his wife and so he had the right to ask for sex whenever he wanted. And that's the normal understanding across history. Across history, the idea is that men provide women resources, women provide men sexual. And so that's why you don't have. The idea of marital rape only existed in the late 20th century and in medieval norms, for example. And it's not just sexual, where when Richard Lionheart and Philip Augustus made a business deal, they slept naked in bed together. King of England, king of France in the late 12th century, because that was the social norm. Or the nobility would have concubines and that was just part of the life. And it's interesting to look at the medieval period where the external. Oh, you had nude public baths. In the medieval period, even post pubescent women would go to them where the entire town would. We think the medieval period didn't like bathing. That's a projection of the early modern period. But it's interesting to look at the medieval period where our stated understanding of this historic event is wildly different from the actual historic event.
Austin Padgett
Right. And a good example is part of it is tied to, like you said, scarcity. Right. If the house is. If you don't have that many rooms then if you have to on the pot in the living room, then you're going to be all exposed. You don't have walls. The same with like cheap bathrooms will have these stalls with like holes at the bottom and gaps in between. And a really nice bathroom will have a door that goes straight up to the ceiling. And it's like heavy and it's more expensive. So like it enables us to escape some of these uncomfortable situations. But with doing that you can like overindulge and remove some instincts for being able to like deal with normal things.
Rudyard Lynch
My friend biology likes to say that wokeness is to biology what Marxism is to economics, where Marxism is basically economics. Like it's economics. Flat earthers, they continue to believe a theory. No one who studies the information believes long after in wokeness is in direct opposition to biology. And one of the themes Norbert Elias makes is that over the modern period the barriers on social behavior became progressively more constrictive. And Elias has a few interesting points. One he says is that it's the removal of anything that appears biologically human. And I think a big reason for that is that modernity is built upon us ignoring and everything that is animal or human. Where if you do see, if you're in a society where you see your parents have sex, you know that there's the innate polarity of the kind of things that like that you, that your father basically has to dominate your mom for this to work. This gives you an understanding of this innate sexual polarity across your entire sociological view of the world. When you don't see other people have sex, it means you can project whatever concepts about the two sexes you have because you don't see the biological reality in action. There's not an open avenue. So in the medieval period, if there's constant war, you constantly see who the most competent and brave people are because courage is being tested. And so because the nobility is consistently braver, they stay in positions of power in the nobility. Or if you live in our understandings of ethnicity and culture, we tend to under prioritize them because we don't interact with people of different cultures in very human ways. If you're just in a business transaction, it's not going to rub off on you how culturally different a Chinese person is from you. Because if you befriend Chinese people and hang out with them or live with them for a period of months, the cultural differences are a lot more stark because you have to do stuff like cook together or manage your schedule or like mediate your emotions. And those are very culturally mandated. So what we've done with modernity is establish a society where we only socially relate to people's external masks, even for our friends, even for family members. And so what we've done is we've made our relationships with strangers on the Internet the most intimate, and then we've made our relations with people we actually know more distant, which would come across as very strange to pre modern peoples. But the other thing is, Norbert Elias makes, is that in pre industrial societies, there was an understanding that you were allowed to be human in front of your social inferiors, where if you were a NOBLEMAN until the 20th century, you would just have sex in front of your servants, where. And even Manor House, a show set in the Edwardian period, talks about that, because they didn't really process the servants as being people. It was just a relentlessly classist society. And there are stories in the Roman period of the master would sleep with his wife and then the slaves would sit outside the door masturbating, because it was like the porn they'd get. And then one of the points Elias makes is that with the rise of socialism and the mass interconnectivity of the modernist worldview, there is the assessment that no one is at the top of the status hierarchy. So the way our current society mediates our social code is no one is allowed to say that they're at the top of the hierarchy. No one's allowed to say that they're in leadership. We permanently act as if we are low status to everyone else, which is. That's a female group strategy. We're in female social groups. It's deeply socially taboo to admit, admit inequality. And most women, when polled scientifically, there's a great book, Warriors. In warriors, most women are scared to succeed, lest their friends envy them and stop liking them. And so what, we've externalized a social system where we have to act as if everyone we interact with is of higher social status than us, as a form of social politeness. And so with the Norbert Elias process, you see the gradual move upwards of social traditions that in earlier societies, only servants would have to do across the entire society, because when the servant was on the payroll, they were there just to serve the purpose for the job, for the boss. And then if you were a blacksmith or if you were a free farmer, you had your own private business. What the Industrial Revolution did is it first institutionalized those social norms for factory workers, where you're paid for a sustained amount of time to not be your normal self. And then that percolated through the upper classes until it became the entire society. Does that make sense to you?
Austin Padgett
Yes. Which makes sense too, because as like the scarcity went down the line, people are starting to encounter this similar experience situations or conundrums or, or opportunities even. And I was wondering, like you said, that 20 to 30 range is key to Western civilization. And right now we're experiencing this kind of breakdown in sexual relations which creates pressure for polygamy. And we're talking about like the women who achieve a certain status and are not willing to date below that status. The only mathematical recourse for them at that point is like political, polygamous relationships with the highest status males, because there isn't the math to work it out. And so are we getting to the point where we're risking like breaking our 20 to 30 range? Because, I mean, how many millennials are past 30 without being married or having a kid? Is that going to put pressure on it? Because you already hear people talking about like, you know, women your age are ruined and impossible and just date like a younger girl. So are we, are we risking, like, losing the opportunity to mate within our similar age range if this breakdown continues?
Rudyard Lynch
Further, were threatened by mouse utopia. And that's really scary. Where mouse utopia was a test in the 60s where they gave mice perfect conditions in a cage. And it's a cage that could hold 6,000 mice. They always heard of like 10. Then what happened each time is the mouse numbers. Without any external threats, with infinite food, good weather, they hit 2,000 out of the potential 6,000. Then their numbers crashed. Female mice became masculine, Male mice became effeminate. The mouse ability to socially interface with each other shut down. And then the mouse birth rate crashed to zero and the colony fails each time. And mouse utopia is identical to the things we're looking through. I made a 40 minute video about it. It's one of my best videos ever. There's not a single thing in mouse utopia that isn't already happening. And we can stop mouse utopia and it just requires the traits manifested by higher men. And a higher man is a term from the 19th century thought where the higher man is one who is capable of understanding a situation, its natural trajectory, and then using intelligence and willpower to offset what would normally be a natural trajectory. So the higher man is capable of entering into a social situation, seeing what's going to happen, taking control of the situation and switching the outcome. Where a higher man is someone who is sentient enough that they're capable of forestalling what is otherwise a death spiral through making conscious decisions, through their sentience. And we need to establish groups of higher men and then re engineer society so that mouse utopia doesn't fucking kill all of us.
Austin Padgett
Yeah, and there's lots of opportunity for men because so many people are. Are dropping the ball. And then I, I wanted to get into, like, how this relates to some of the signs that pop up of this breakdown. Right. Is like the gay stuff started to get a lot bigger 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Yeah, I remember when I. I was in 10th grade when people just started talking about it. Like it dropped like a bomb. Like there's this new thing, people are gay. And then the debate was immediately, is, is it biological or social? And the guys were just like talking about it, like, trying to figure it out. Like it was like a animated conversation like this or this. And then the girls were walking around very anxious and very certain that it's. It's biological. It's biological. And the point of that is because they were terrified of quote unquote bigotry or whatever. So they. Because they think it's biological. So they want people to know it's biological so that they can't question their decision or whatever. And so it just becomes brainwashed where, like, most people accepted that it only took, like, people debated it for like a month. And then people kind of like settled into a general pattern of thinking it was biological. And it's so clearly tied to this distribution. Because when you have a polygamous distribution, like we've said, for every girl in the trunk of Andrew Tate's Bugatti, there's a dude standing around without the ability to be matched up. So then you have a response to the sexual marketplace. And a great example of this is on the edge of herder societies. Right on the edge of outskirts of herder societies, there's a 10 to 1 male to female ratio and a lot of goats. And so in those conditions, you get more people having sex with goats than normal. But nobody says that people on the outskirts of herder societies have a genetic predisposition to bestiality. So it's never even an argument that's made.
Rudyard Lynch
There is a genetic proclivity towards homosexuality that exists across society. We have records of it from the medieval and the ancient world. Certain societies are significantly more amenable to it. So the ancient Greeks, it's normally bisexuality because a certain degree of man is. We have an innate sexual impulse to mate with the other sex. That's biological. There's a certain range of guys. You could also get them to sleep with dudes too, with a social context. So normally correlated to.
Austin Padgett
Also to openness to experience and other things like ADHD behavior. Yeah, go ahead.
Rudyard Lynch
In ancient Greek culture, bisexuality was treated better than homosexuality and you had a big cultural trajectory. There's been an argument recently about were the Greeks gay? And a lot of conservatives say no. But yes, the Greeks were definitely gay. We have significant records for this. Lots of primary sources that stuff. And so as an example, in the Roman Empire, because they're part of the same broader civilization, parents would get scared their sons went to the wrong part of town so they wouldn't get gay raped. And the Greco Romans had it. Islam actually has a very strong homosexual tradition, which people forget. And Europeans thought about that in the 1800s when they were conquering Islam, where they just. The Europeans would say that they were. They'd call the Arabs homosexuals and they would say that the Arabs aren't men. Where the big party the most gay.
Austin Padgett
Porn is in Pakistan, I think.
Rudyard Lynch
I'm not surprised. I mean, the Taliban does it. Because the thing is, both the Greeks and the Muslims, they had very cloistered perta societies where women weren't really allowed to leave the house. And so these guys and women also weren't educated, so the men weren't capable of forming strong emotional bonds with women. Because when you finally got married, she's never left the house, you can't talk to her. And also because there's no sexual access till marriage, the men start sleeping with each other for that reason. And so the Greeks, the Muslims, and this was biggest like a thousand years ago. And also medieval Japan all had cultures of the same kind of homosexual bisexuality. And in each case it was also correlated with pedophilia, where these. It was a form of. It was a form. It was frequently an older man sleeping with the. In all of those cultures, an older man sleeping with a teenage boy as a sort of like patron relationship.
Austin Padgett
Right. Like Macron.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
Austin Padgett
And there's. Yeah. So I'm not saying that, like people never did gay stuff in history. Just the way that people conceptualize it as biological is off. Because if you have like a highly monogamous, healthy structure, then there's going to be very little of that. It doesn't mean that people aren't capable of doing whatever, pursuing any impulse. It's just not so fatalistic. And then there's. There's things like. There's physical traits that correlate to it because any Trait that correlates with a lower likelihood that you're going to be selected sexually in a more competitive environment is going to make that line. So I remember what I said in 10th grade when we first started talking about this, and this might be my seared trait where I was like, it's not, it's not biological, it's not this. It's literally just dudes who can't get chicks.
Rudyard Lynch
So.
Austin Padgett
And there's an underlying kind of truth to that. But because, because so much of the free will is taken out of it, people shouldn't feel down about that or fatalistic because you can use free will to drastically alter your position in this regardless of your like physical traits or.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes or.
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
Rudyard Lynch
So we know physiologically there is a biological component where homosexuals have higher, they have lower, they have higher rates of feminine chemical hormones. And if you hit a tipping point, if you plug enough feminine chemical hormones into a man, he's going to start liking men because you're getting the same inputs as women. And there's several theories about this. I don't trust any of the science in this regard. They have too many incentives to lie. But one of it is that like more girly nature is primed to make more girly style guys because they're more attractive to women under certain contexts. Under certain contexts, women more feminine. Also. There's an idea that it's a sort of like in an environment where there aren't enough females, it's a sort of submission switch of I am not a competitor, don't hurt me. And I think that's part of what's going on, where our society is getting mass cucked by the machine, where in this society the actual male female sexual intercourse is being taken up by women getting married to the state, which is part of the sexual revolution program, where women are getting funding from the state, they serve the state in the school system, then the state gives them these fake bureaucratic jobs where the state has built out these de facto harems of young fertile women who serve the state and secluded away from other men. But the weird thing is that in these state function governments over history have maintained harems. They've been normal, especially so outside the western world because Asia has been nearly uniformly polygamous, while most European societies are monogamous. The monarch gets these thousands of women who he keeps in his own, he supports them, keeps them independent. Our government did that because you look at government employees, they're overwhelmingly women, but they're not attractive and they're also not sleeping with Them where lots of tech companies have these staffs. You'll see the teams of like 10 women who are all in communications or HR. And the companies are hiring them, but the bosses aren't sleeping with them. So it's the same function as a harem, except there's no sex.
Austin Padgett
And as is part of like the male gay thing, saying, I'm not in competition with the state, like, I'm not a threat to the state. You.
Rudyard Lynch
You take the women's homosexuality is partly biological. It's also cultural. I think Mouse utopia probably increased the scale of homosexuality. I just don't know by the process. And homosexuality wasn't a concept until the end of the 19th century where there was this German Jewish thinker who developed it. And then it spooled out from there culturally, where they called it sodomy and the so.
Austin Padgett
And even that was controversial in Greece, to be fair to the conservatives at that point.
Rudyard Lynch
There's a historic fact I saw and I tried to research it till I figured out if it was true. And I got several, like, actual history books to back it up. The fact is, in the 17th century, nannies would give the boys they were working with hand jobs. And I read that and I thought that's one of those historic blurry lines where I could see it be true. But I also need more evidence. And there's a primary source of a young Louis XIV in the 17th century. He was like three years old and he was agitated at the French court. And then a nanny just walked over and then rubbed one out. And then he calmed down. And everyone in the French court laughed because the king would have sex in front of his retainers. People would take a dump in front of each other at Versailles. It's weird. People would piss in the corners of Versailles. And I was trying to figure out.
Austin Padgett
It's the same dynamic of giving us snickers or something.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. And I was trying to figure out if that was going on in the 17th century. And I read a few other sources that talk about it. When did masturbating become taboo? And the conclusion I came to was 18th century. The first anti masturbation treatise is early 18th century, saying that it promotes mental illness and lack of self control. And there was never a real argument for it. BAP likes to say that monkeys don't masturbate. That's not true, actually. When I was in Mexico, I've seen.
Austin Padgett
It in the zoo.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, When I was in Mexico and I was hanging with my buddies, I was living with a bunch of frat Bros. We literally saw a monkey in the tree next to us jerk off in front of us.
Austin Padgett
They make eye contact with you while they do it.
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. So it's in all mammals masturbate. It's a biological trait. Not really. Any known health side effects with hands?
Austin Padgett
Mammals with hands?
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. No. Like horses growing up. I'd see horses rub their genitals against fences. They do it all the time. Dogs will rub their genitals against all sorts of things. And so it's. Masturbating is not mentioned in a single place in the Bible. The closest passage is Onan in the Old Testament where Onan had to impregnate a lady and then he pulled out and didn't, and then God took vengeance on him. The context, though, was that in that family society you had moral obligations to impregnate certain clan members. Onan took his wife because his brother died. Where in that clan society you have to marry inside the family. So if the brother dies, his brother takes his wife. He refused to impregnate her, then God strikes him down. Masturbating is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible. The Bible does talk about sexual sins, and I think it's more useful to see sexual sin because our society has a weird attitude about this stuff as the natural order telling you what's smart. Where if you're just. First of all, I've been friends with many fuck boys and they're never happy. They're always miserable after a little bit. It's not a good strategy. And it's also not really as hard as you mature people do. And so I see lots of young guys who build their entire lives around sex directly or indirectly, where they. They'll work a corporate job just for the status which they hate. They'll obsess over getting laid, going to the gym, girls liking them, and if they win, they'll probably get a girl who doesn't even like them that much. Not very. A good relationship. And I kind of want to shake them and say, dude, get other hobbies, have a personality. Don't build your entire identity directly or indirectly about sex. But I've got a whole different point there.
Austin Padgett
And be fruitful and multiply.
Rudyard Lynch
In the 18th century, you saw this anti masturbation sentiment develop where masturbating was taboo in the. It wasn't. It was on the list of sins, but it was on the very low side of things where medieval Catholicism had a long list of sins. And so, like, being impolite was a sin. I don't know, like being cowardly not paying your taxes and shit. So it was on the lower end of the sins. And what actually happened is that with the rise of rationality, you saw originally Christian sexual norms get morphed into a way to ignore human biology. And so it's interesting where Christianity does talk about sexual sins, but the Christian moral code we have kept put sexual sins at a very high premium, which was not the case earlier. And that was a growth of the early modern period with the cult of reason, where, for example, medieval knights would keep concubines. In large periods, the Middle Ages, the church would have wives. And it was sort of like a wink and nod culture where if you go to South America, that's the way things are. But you saw a feminization of the church over the early modern period. And that was because atheism was masculine coded. And so the church became highly feminized. And women's priorities is always the safety of their children and their reproductive ability. And so when women, the church got feminized, sexual sins became the thing the church cared about the most, which is what you see. And it's, I find, think it's really off putting to a lot of like religious people where a lot of people who are spiritual or want to be more religious, where the, I mean, a lot of religions just become moral policing without any expectation that you can talk to God or some deeper spirituality. And I think that's a con. That's not what religion should be. Religion should be about God. And as it became more moral policing and also the standards of sec. So you saw this fundamental disjoint between the moral policing of the society and the actual code, which turned people off a lot from Christianity. I actually think I've seen anthropological studies that said that the biggest variable killing religion in the last century is, is religion's inability to basically integrate with sex. Where you see the application of a Christian moral code inconsistently with modernity. Where, for example, I find Christians do a lot to sexually shame men, but they never do so for women because that's taboo. You'll never hear Christians taught. You'll rarely hear Christians talk about like women shouldn't be sluts or the importance of family, where the patriarchy is part of both testaments. I mean, you can write out some stuff in the Old Testament, which has been a Christian tradition going back to James, that. And we also, we just colloquially don't keep up with everything. In the Old Testament we don't stone adulterers, but in the New Testament they talk about the patriarchy and so what Christians did and they also. Hierarchy is part of the New Testament. Genocide is acceptable in the Old Testament. And so what Christians did and what the west did was we created a vaguely Christian like social code which we got people to pretend was our actual moral code where there's this idea that like we have to support immigrants and we have to give to the poor because these are these vaguely Christian like notions. But if you actually followed Christianity you would end up with something like the pre industrial societies which were hierarchical and violent and patriarchal. And so we played this sort of cognitive game of trying to shove in a value system we didn't actually have, which got progressively divorced from the society where modernity faces lots of. And there's. I have multiple wonderful books about this. This modernity faces lots of the psychological traits of both schizophrenia and autism which are actually psychologically quite similar states because they're the left hemisphere gaining predominance over the right hemisphere. So much so that you cannot integrate with your context. Autism is overly rigid box thinking. Schizophrenia is the inability to develop easily category categorizable thought thoughts. So you get stuck in your own mind. And with modernity we subdivide the world into these very stark boxes. You can't see across the box. So we can't see how stuff like sexual norms has a manifestation on the entire society because no one can see the big picture. And so I say that we are a society which is squeamish, terrified and obsessed with sex at the same time. And I can explain that if you'd like.
Austin Padgett
Yeah, go for it.
Rudyard Lynch
So we're squeamish because we have very strange attitudes towards certain things where for example nudes and art have been normalized for most of Western history, even in the Middle ages through the modern period. But if you, let's say in it. But if you were to like let's say have an artistic nude in a lot of social settings in the west today, especially America, you would get this just bad reaction. People will people know that their 13 year old son is watching the most degenerate form of porn. But at the same time the artistic nude is too much. So it's this. We see these weird disjoints or as an example, our expectations about what we want out of our sexual partners are completely unrealistic. Especially so for women where they'll, they'll make the, the laundry list of six, five of six, four make six figures, handsome, successful, that stuff.
Austin Padgett
And which means they have to be in a harem. Yeah, if they want.
Rudyard Lynch
But Then they're not, they're not going to accept the harem where these, they'll, they'll, they'll look for this guy and then they'll be surprised when this guy has other options. So you get these deeply schizophrenic, deeply inconsistent worldviews where we're obsessed with sexual, where our entire society is hinting at sex to produce financial gain. So the idea is that you will work hard and get commercial benefit for sex. This is the only valid way to live. We're not going to support people who want to make art or are religious or have these higher virtues. We're going to support commercialism and sex as our dominant social thing. Then we can't actually acknowledge sex for what it is in a mature way. You can't say just sex is a biological human force that is good and replicable, but it's also a powerful force that you have to be a mature adult about. I treat sexual. Sexual self regulation is comparable to firearm ownership where if you can trust someone to own a firearm, you can trust them to have their own sexuality and to manage who they sleep with. And at the same time so obsessed, squeamish and terrified. Because if you actually, we are a culture which promotes an enormous amount of sexual anxiety. And once you see it, you can't unsee it because our entire motivation mechanism is sexually shaming. Sexually shaming men. If a man has an opinion, the immediate reaction is to call him an incel. Or to say he, like, doesn't sleep with enough women or to say that, like, he's not successful. And it's. You express opinions even on stuff like academic topics or religion. This happens because that's the only mechanism we use as a culture. It's all sexual shaming. And what that does, especially with feminism and with the war between the sexes, is, is it removes any degree of genuine intimacy between the sexes. It removes trust, it removes the ability to grow as people. Where we are a society of completely peripheral relationships. Because deep relationships require moral character, they require years, they require trust, they require social structures. And the reason, I think part of the reason people aren't procreating is they can't establish deep relationships like that to have children. And their social network of relationships has also collapsed. The biggest predictor for marital success is an intact social community between both partners.
Austin Padgett
Oh, totally. That also creates a lot of pressure because the family's losing a member or whatever. And it's, it's funny because you're taking what's supposed to be the most synergistic thing ever was, like the union of a man and a woman and making it into a zero sum competition, which probably relates to your zero sum worldview. Like. Yeah, how do you take like a man and a woman? Making a kid is literally the opposite of. It's the least zero sum thing possible. And in life, like, it's because we reduce relationships to that.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it's because the witches won. The idea in most cultures were that witches were often childless older women who grew resentful of their excluded status in the society where if you're a child.
Austin Padgett
Those are, those are bitches mixing it.
Rudyard Lynch
Up, the bitches to witches pipeline. And so we just gave that demographic total power. And of course they kill society because that's the way witches always have been. But I think we've covered the sexual revolution adequately through context. The other big thing is the rise of the pill, which Jordan Peterson has had an event comparable to the atom bomb. And this is a, this is a socially taboo opinion to have. But also this channel is not monetized where when you look at a lot of the MeToo stuff, and I have profound sympathy and empathy for victims of sexual abuse is in the results of the 1960s world, the cultural message was that sex is a handshake. Sex is just two people being together and we should have free love. Then when these Hollywood executives hear the message and, and then they tell young women, sleep with me for a contract in that culture, they're going off the stated message. Because if sex is just a handshake, and if sex is just a handshake, asking to sleep with someone to get a job isn't seen as a big deal. And this is a bad situation. It reflects on no one positively. But we have to take responsibility as a culture where if you say sex is free and sex isn't serious, then people act like it. You have to realize you got the natural conclusion of your behavior.
Austin Padgett
There's an amazing example of this in this show. It's a straight face comedian Nate something. He does like a sitcom around testing pilot, crashing and like making the relationship the focus as a joke. And he has all these people come in and they're like making out for he. Because he told. Tell them that's what you're supposed to do for the scene. And then he brings their, their girlfriends or boyfriends in to watch it and he's what? He's just watching it with them and ask them how, how they feel about their significant other making out with someone and like getting in, like getting into the scene you know what I mean? And there's just this insane, like, biological and mental disjoint between the culture you're pointing out and the fact that it's just like. It's like the most humiliating thing ever to watch.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
Austin Padgett
And then. But the. The guy's like, well, what. It's just acting, you know, I. I guess he's like, mentally segmented this. And then Nate the comedian is just like, straight faced. Yeah. You know, like, everybody knows. They're like, they, they've. It's a real delusion that people have entered into to think that they can strip these things of their meaning. Yeah, it. And yeah, you go ahead and I'll finish that.
Rudyard Lynch
It reminds me of one of the quotes my. One of the quotes my father made where we were talking, the news came up, and my dad said, I can never imagine how a girl would do only fans, because doesn't she realize she's bringing shame upon her ancestral line for centuries? And this is one of, like, the examples of cultural projection, because on both lines of my family, we have genealogical knowledge going back centuries of all our family's occupations. And so whenever we have family meetings, we always talk about the recent genealogical discoveries we've made. And every generation makes this sort of effort to pass on all the records and the family knowledge of the previous generations. And so we have lots of records going back to the early 1800s from our family members, because every single generation, we passed it. On this map I have back here, it's been passed in my family since the 19th century. It's from 1854. And it's interesting to see examples of cultural projection like that because it shows how different culture is. Because if you have a. If you have a family structure. And both of my parents told me growing up that the honor of my entire ancestral line stood on my shoulders. It's the sole male descendant. If you view the world that way, where, you know the things you do will be remembered for centuries, it creates radically different incentive structures for how you live your life. So I'm pointing this out as an example of a fairly subtle cultural difference inside different groups of white Americans, which is still, I think Mulan is.
Austin Padgett
Mulan is probably the biggest exposure most Americans got to even that kind of consciousness.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
Austin Padgett
And it is really embarrassing when you think about just like everything every line of everyone in your line of ancestors has done to survive just for you to, like, have a pool party and a, like, banana split and, like, call it a day.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
Austin Padgett
It's pretty insane.
Rudyard Lynch
The section.
Austin Padgett
Yeah, go Ahead.
Rudyard Lynch
I'm sorry interrupting you during this conversation, but the. So the sexual revolution radically increased sexuality in the short term, and then it crashed because you removed stabilizing mechanisms. And so I think this has been a pretty serious crash, especially so post 2020. And I think they're lying about the stats where I think the mating crisis is significantly worse than people let on. Because the only major statistics on this were from like 21, 2021. They never studied it after. But from context clues and everything I've seen in the world, it's clearly pretty bad. Where I imagine if like the gross total human mating had a chart, it would be pretty high in the early 20th century with these strict sexual norms, skyrockets in 1960, gradually goes down where people were having. We actually do have anthropological stats about this. People were having less sex in the late than the mid 20th century. And then it collapses precipitously with the iPhone and then Covid. And so the issue we're facing now is sort of a market failure. And boomers don't get market failures. And we're experiencing market failures demographically, sexually, economically, and sociologically. Where like an economic market failure is you go to school, you acquire the jobs, but no one's hiring, so you're increasing your valuation in the market doesn't actually result in an increase in the quality of the outcome. And these tend to come from social breakdowns. So due to the removal of culture and tradition and society, we saw a sociological market breakdown which manifests in sex, but also manifests in the entire society, in people's abilities to get jobs, to develop social connections, to find meaning, where there's just been a sociological market failure in the last five years. And I think this is the great issue young people face. And it's why I do a lot of the work I do that we're going to have to establish new cultural systems in new cultural traditions. Just as a matter of survival.
Austin Padgett
There's a sense of extreme urgency. Because sure, the trend has been going on for a while, but it was eating into cushion. Now we're eating into flesh and tissue, muscle, bone. Every year that we don't fix things. It's. It's damaged with no cushion. Yeah. And like, there's ways that, like you said, the church scolds men around their sexual relationships, and then online mostly kind of scolds women about being sluts. And the reality is you kind of need to incorporate this responsibility disability on. On both ends. Like men seeing it as their status objective to, you know, social competition to have Sex with as many women as. As possible is. Is equally as responsible as the. The flip side of that. And you don't really see people take that on and as serious of a way. And then at the same time like the whole Christian rings waiting till this long process of marriage which doesn't make sense in that economic context is. Is not as ideal relative to how they used to just like get. Marry the first girl they got pregnant.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
Austin Padgett
Something. But then you can't do that because of birth control. So there's no like natural pressure for the responsibility.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
Austin Padgett
It's just like it's broken down everywhere. But like if you're having these men will have relationships and sex with a bunch of women between 25 and 30 and then they're. Those women are totally screwed.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
Austin Padgett
When that doesn't turn into anything serious. So it's like a disaster all around.
Rudyard Lynch
A huge variable here is that and this is one of the things I'm surprised no one's noticed is the public's gotten significantly crazier since 2020 and I'm surprised no one talked at it because it's obviously true. It's obviously true. Frigging nuts compared to five years ago. But another variable here is a huge chunk of the population realized they're never going to procreate. So their biological car alarms went off. And China is the best example which is the lowest birth rate of anywhere and one of the lowest of anywhere in the world. And the youngest large bracket of Chinese are 38 year olds. Almost none of them are married. This huge age demographic, especially the women are aging out and they're starting to freak out because they know that they're not going to have kids. Same thing with a lot of the craziness in the left is using, let's use Taylor Swift as an example. Taylor Swift is sort of like the archetypal embodiment of the millennial woman. She's probably realizing now she's not going to have kids and she's dated all these different men which she's largely dissatisfied with her relationships as you can see from her music. And you have this huge bracket of millennials who are nearly 40 years old who are just freaking out.
Austin Padgett
Everyone's kind of realizing at the same time. I mean we joked about that like pairing like getting a zoomer incel with no job prospects and have him get a 40 year old boss woman pregnant or something just so they can both like make an agreement to procreate because otherwise they're not matching up. So I'm gonna So go after those Mills boys.
Rudyard Lynch
This video's. That's not gonna work. So I was reading a TV show. So one of my buddies writing a TV show, in the TV show I was reading through it to like see if it was a good idea. And in this TV show this 19 year old incel falls in love with this successful 38 year old career woman. And I just told him that would never happen. She would not find this 19 year old incel to be attractive at all because he's not like some physical uber chad in the show either. He's just a normal 19 year old guy.
Austin Padgett
Well, people have made agreements like it does not necessarily a relationship but like people have made other bargains where it's like a gay, a gay person who has a 40 year old boss check friend who's not getting pregnant and they're like well why don't you just get me pregnant because we're friends and et cetera. Like that's. Those conversations are happening as people freak out.
Rudyard Lynch
This is going to be our longest video ever, which I'm okay with because this is a huge topic and we have to touch on. Lots of my longest videos are almost unilaterally videos where I first have to debunk a modernist notion. Then I have to stay with the actual truth is, and this is one of the videos, it's half debunking modernist ideas and it's half going through the history. And so for the final segment I'm going to go through the broad trajectory of world history to see how it changed sex. So for man, the hunter, hunter gatherer societies, we used to believe they were more gender equal. In reality a lot of hunter gatherer societies are quite misogynistic. There's a huge amount of diversity though, where for example of the prehistoric Stone age people from 10,000 years ago in modern North America, Native American men now are shorter than the prehistoric Native American men and the Native American prehistoric women are shorter than, are taller than modern Native American women. So the difference between Native Americans 10,000 years ago and today is the men were taller than today and the women were shorter. And that suggests a very hunting based society where men got a dispos. A disproportionate amount of the resources. And the thing with. So there's a lot of diversity among hunter gatherer people. So I don't want to externalize it. There was just infinite different stuff going on. But there's, there's also the argument about hunter gatherer religion which was shamanism and shamanism was popular around the world, it was where you. It was where you go into hell. And then through facing hell and fighting demons, you gain mystic abilities which you can use to take. Take back to your own people to protect and heal them. And shamanism was predominantly male coded, but you also had masculine and feminine versions of shamanism which operated out of their own energetic systems. Where, for example, the Norse God Odin was a master of both masculine and feminine shamanism. And in Viking culture, being a man who used feminine shamanism, you were automatically assumed to be a homosexual. But Odin was so manly, he could do it at the same time. And it was still socially acceptable.
Austin Padgett
Right. Could get away with it. Like when you do that high pitched.
Rudyard Lynch
Voice to get people, hey, everybody, I'm Uncle Tony. Uncle Tony loves you. Uncle Tony says hi.
Austin Padgett
So you gotta be a real chad to pull that off.
Rudyard Lynch
Thank you. You're too kind. But man the farmer, I should say woman the farmer because they were the ones out there with the hoes and the crops. These were societies where women tend to do did worse because they were part of these broader clan societies. The archaic society around the world was a feminine communitarian society where the longhouse cultures, which Baps speaks about, he's talking about the Neolithic longhouse, which was the builders of Stonehenge and Skara Brae and those cultures that got wiped out by the Aryan conquerors nearly completely. And the idea of a longhouse culture, that we assume that those cultures were feminine, we don't really have a lot of good evidence for it, but it fits with the context. They're nature based religions. They don't seem like strong, they don't seem like warrior cultures. And then one of the prime longhouse cultures are Southeast Asia, where you have these huge longhouses. And it's the longhouse, because women like communitarian living conditions like the village. And Americans, interestingly, tend to pull from regions of Europe that weren't village settlements. Especially the sub regions of the British Isles that the most Americans came from were the parts of the British Isles where people didn't live in villages, they lived in homesteads. So this is a big differentiator between the American character in the rest of the world. The rest of the world, people live in these villages where they're on top of each other, they're constantly in proximity. And in America, like there's. There's a saying that I heard growing up where if you can see your neighbor's smokestack, your land, it's too crowded. So that's an attitude a lot of rural Americans have, and it's very opposed to a lot of the world we're in. Southeast Asian anthropology. Even if you have lots of land, you'll live next to your neighbor so you're not lonely. So Southeast Asian society is prime. So you're never alone, so you never experience loneliness. And in these long houses, especially in the jungle, these huge, entire village lives in a single house. So you'll. There's no privacy. You constantly talk to each other, you constantly gossip and that stuff. So it's this very feminine society. And the Longhouse societies are normally seen as like primitive mountain peoples. You have some in India and China too, where they're very rooted in the earth. They're quite poor. They're, they're, they're. They have both the negatives and the positives of the sort of archaic cultures which survive significantly later. And their men also often become headhunters.
Austin Padgett
Headhunters?
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
Austin Padgett
You mean, like, they kill people from other tribes?
Rudyard Lynch
The Longhouse cultures in Southeast Asia and in New guinea, they're, they're, they, they widely get their opponents and then take their heads and then collect their heads on spikes. I don't know. Right.
Austin Padgett
Literally headhunters. Not like a bounty hunter, like a hunter of heads. Collector.
Rudyard Lynch
And after that, if any of you in the comments wonder why Longhouse cultures correlate with headhunters, I'd be intrigued to hear it.
Austin Padgett
Well, see if they have an answer for that. Yeah, I was also just making a connection between the scarcity and the Longhouse, because the Longhouse is the ultimate example of no boundaries.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
Austin Padgett
Like, it's literally one room for everybody. It's not like you only have three rooms. It's not like you have bathroom stalls.
Rudyard Lynch
It's.
Austin Padgett
It's completely exposed. But I was also thinking of, like, you mentioning someone building a house right next to, to them on a plot of land is like the meme where the guy. There's a huge row of urinals and the one guy just goes in the one right next to him, like, what the hell?
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. The feminine tries to destroy boundaries and the masculine tries to set them up. And so the more masculine a culture is, the more it'll believe in stuff like private property and that stuff. And so archaic period. Then you have the masculine revolution. We talk about that. One of the biggest vectors for the masculine revolution was the Aryan invasions. And a lot of these, like, matriarchal, feminist, prehistoric writers who try to project a matriarchal paradise onto the. The ancient world, they unilaterally hate the rise of The Abrahamic religions and the Aryan invasions, which they see as the rise of the ultimate masculine forces. And over time, actually, in a lot of the ancient world, you had, you had what we would consider to be strange sexual practices because the Abrahamic traditions created social structures which tried to separate people from biology. And that's the case the Axial Age religions in general, where in the pre Axial Age areas, where in Babylon, for example, it was a custom. Every young girl, when she came of age would go to the temple and then have a coin. And then the first man who walk up and gave her the coin would fuck her, she'd lose her virginity, and then she'd marry. So all Babylonian women had to be a whore at least once as a rite of passage. And in Babylon, in Mesopotamia or with the Canaanites, they, they would have temple prostitution because the gods lived on earth and because the gods were like people, you had to give the gods sex. So you'd have temple prostitutes and then people would sleep with the temple prostitutes. And this would simulate the sexual activity of the God.
Austin Padgett
So they would marry the guy that just picked their coin out. Like pretty random.
Rudyard Lynch
They, they were expected to have premarital fornication. Once in their life you had to fornicate.
Austin Padgett
Oh, that wasn't related to their marriage.
Rudyard Lynch
After you do that, once you, you, you, you, you marry. Interestingly, Babylon saw a comparable trajectory to other civilizations where Babylon sort of is a highly patriarchal society. And by the end, it was a society where women and men had legal equality. And the Greeks also had similar sexual things. Where the Greeks started as a highly patriarchal society. By the end, women had legal equality with men. And as an example, the Theban sacred band were warriors who would have homosexual sex with each other. And that was part of Greek culture. And the Greeks started out very socially and sexually constrictive, where basically women were in burkas. They weren't allowed to leave the house except for Sparta. Sparta treated women very well and they'd even have customs where women would. Young women would dance naked in front of the young men. And then their elders would say, if you're manly enough, you get to get one. And the future, future. So they were using the Athenians or like the Taliban, and then the Spartans were the opposite where they were using female sex as a motivational technique. And you had. The Greek mythology had a significant amount of sex. There was a significant amount of incest in, in Greek mythology too. It's actually a theme and there's a story of Enkidu from the epic of Gilgamesh. Just talk about these ancient cultures where Enkidu. Enkidu was this like savage barbarian who went down to where Gilgamesh was king. This is ancient Mesopotamia. And Enkidu was causing too many issues and he was like a savage. So Gilgamesh sent him a prostitute to sleep with him for two weeks because the understanding was that if he did so, it would civilize him. And she taught him to eat civilized foods. And then after that it occurred, he met Gilgamesh. He and Gilgamesh then became best friends and went on adventures together.
Austin Padgett
Right. So they. Yeah, and then there's this element that we've talked about before where like prostitution can be an outlet that prevents people from doing other more degenerate stuff before marriage. And then basically the like summary of. And it concentrates the harm within like a small percent of females that also get compensated instead of just doing it for free. And you see that in developing countries is a like very clear understanding around sex. Like, yes, any woman becomes a prostitute if they sense that there's not an expectation of a relationship because they're like, fuck you. And then I guess the conclusion of the episode is masculine societies are good for women and they know it because feminine societies ironically result in the Handmaid's Tale because it's collectivist. And female rights come from Western society, which we lost in the West.
Rudyard Lynch
I have a few other points, so I gotta throw some other facts out. In Egyptian mythology, the universe is made by cosmic jizz. That's also true in Mayan mythology. The gods masturbated out of boredom. And that's what the universe is. And you have terms in ancient mysticism of the divine semen. And the divine semen passes on through the royal line. And so it is like the national, the national semen consciousness of the nation. Avola talks about this, so you have a lot of weird stories about that. And so the pre axial age cultures, they integrated sex into this sort of into this religious structure. But in the process all of those religious structures became degenerate. So all of these societies face degeneracy. Where Rome as an example, societies start out as sexually prude when they're conquering, and then as they get wealthier, they become more sexually degenerate. Where the Romans had loads of sexual degeneracy, where prostitutes would stand out naked in the street soliciting company, and prostitutes would cost as much as a loaf of bread in the Roman Empire, so it was mass industrial grade prostitution. In the Greco Roman classical world, it was just an expectation that the master would have sex with his female servants. That's another element for nannies giving hand jobs in the 17th century, is that in the pre industrial world you could not separate hierarchy from sex. So there was a general understanding that if a man, like a boss, had enough power over a woman, they start sleeping together because they didn't separate power and sex. It's also why a quarter of the black American gene pool is of white origin, where even though the whites didn't, the whites created this on paper aversion to race mixing, but in reality the white men were sleeping with lots of slaves. And the Axial age was a societal breakthrough. Away from that. Where all the Axial age religions, I'm going to include Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism is they're trying to create degrees of objectivity against human competition. Where humans normally fight tooth and claw for status or sex or power. And what all of the Axial age religions were doing was trying to create a distinct dimension independent from Darwinistic competition. So you look at Christianity, Christianity is these are the nate human traits that when don't tempered, they create tragedy of the commons issues like gluttony, lust, pride, those things. What then occurred was that this uncompetitive societal space took over all of society where we don't have space for the actual original competitive thing that these religions formed against, where we secularized these religious social codes, thus removing God. But they grew so much due to social organization in the industrial revolution that there used to be this like external society that Christianity existed to mediate and control. The society died. And so now we have this. We took these religious codes which existed as sort of as temperings on human sexuality, where the axiom so Christianity was genuinely a shift away from radical sexualization. And I think a big reason women loved Christianity and were one of its biggest proponents is that it gave women sexual protections against high status men. And so you couldn't do stuff like keep prostitutes in the street naked. You couldn't like keep harems of female sex slaves. And the Christians developed the idea that the marriage is a bond of two people together. Rather than previous societies just had attitudes, high status man gets women. So in previous society, most, almost most societies in history view male cheating is very different from female cheating. Christianity destroyed that by saying cheating is equivalently bad across sexes. And so like the red pill. And that entire red pill worldview is significantly truer outside the west than inside it. Where in Russia when a wealthy man has a mistress, he will ditch her at age 21 because she's too old, he's going to get a night an 18 year old. In China, you look at red pill, they have a term called the leftover women where a woman can't get married past age 30 or 35 and they'll openly call them leftover women. Where Christianity created these social protections against really extractive red pill behavior, but that ultimately caused delusion. So when you look at this trajectory from the Axial age religions in Europe versus Asia, it's the opposite. From the medieval through ancient through medieval, early modern periods, Europe saw liberalizing attitudes towards women. In Asia you saw constricting attitudes where the average Asian woman had significantly more freedom and social agency in the year 1000 than in the year 1800. Because Asia went through this process of increasing patriarchy and increasing control on women where. And it often caused horrible practices like female genital mutilation, which is cutting up genitals so she can't enjoy sex. That's big in Somalia and Egypt. Foot binding, breaking a woman's feet in China and these transcended social class. It started out as high status things where in 19th century China women would actively try to have their daughter's feet get broken. So they couldn't, they could barely walk as a status thing. And in India they would just, they had a thing called purda. And in a lot of cases high status, low status people would try to imitate high status people and it would fail. Where? In the harem. Where Across Asia, every Asian society had polygamy. In Islam, a wealthy man keeps a harem and they're all taken care of because he's wealthy. In India, when a poor man tries perta, he shoves his wife in a part of the shack where he has a curtain and she can't leave the curtain. And so you see these, and you see these horror stories at British India or. India was a society which treated women the worst across history. Widow burning was common because since a woman's value was sexual, when she died, when her husband died, she should die because she has been, she's no longer a virgin, so she shouldn't remarry. And across Asia you saw these just horrific things happen. And a lot of right wingers say that women have never been oppressed over history. And I don't believe that a lot of the Asian stuff is just genuinely, profoundly cruel for no real good gain. I see, you see with Islam and the Taliban today, where that was a radical Islamist treatment of women, Islam has had those attitudes of like burkas and seclusion for at least the last 500 years. They didn't exist a thousand years ago or under the Prophet Muhammad when women had a significant amount of social things. They arose due to the Islamic dark age which was a trend across all of Asia and then they solidified where you'll see these memes about Iran or Lebanon in the 70s with women wearing bikinis with people like women wearing short shorts. And so this was a long standing trend in Islam which had an explosion within the last generation. But within over the 21st century we've seen a radical feminization of the Middle east where like I have Middle Eastern friends and they have feminism in Saudi Arabia now where. And their birth rates collapsing too. So it's. Islam's having the same thing. It's just, it's just later.
Austin Padgett
And China. Go ahead.
Rudyard Lynch
Oh, I'm just gonna say I'm done.
Austin Padgett
Oh, perfect. Yeah. China doesn't subbind anymore like so it's the getting stuck in a thousand year collectivist bureaucracy is really bad for women essentially.
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
Austin Padgett
And it's so Christianity. Individuality creates like the man and woman, whatever relationship and then you got the death of God with the return of the polygamy that you're describing in the pre Christian society. So it all makes sense. It all comes together.
Rudyard Lynch
All of evolution.
Austin Padgett
You know what we have to fix?
Rudyard Lynch
The answer to evolution is being a chad.
Austin Padgett
Yep.
Rudyard Lynch
Okay.
Austin Padgett
And the women will appreciate it. So go chat, go chat out.
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. Next episode is going to be the History of Mysticism. I will catch you soon. Goodbye.
Whatifalth
History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.
History 102: Explaining Sex and Power in History
Hosted by Turpentine | Release Date: July 21, 2025
In this compelling episode of History 102, host Turpentine engages with Rudyard Lynch, the creator of the popular YouTube channel WhatifAltHist, and co-host Austin Padgett to delve deep into the intricate relationship between sex and power throughout history. Their conversation weaves through various historical periods, anthropological insights, and modern societal dynamics to provide a comprehensive understanding of how sexual norms and power structures have shaped civilizations.
Rudyard Lynch opens the discussion by emphasizing the importance of thematic exploration in historical study. He remarks:
"[...] when I tried to figure this topic, I came to realize the only way to understand that is to look at the relationships between men and women over history. Because the physical act of coitus in any given historic context is completely predicated upon the social relationship between men and women in that society."
[00:18]
This perspective sets the stage for an examination of how sexual relationships reflect and influence broader societal structures.
Lynch critiques contemporary society's paradoxical approach to sexuality, highlighting its concealment from children and the resultant lack of understanding:
"I think the culture of hiding sex from children is not good. And children could see very bad things about the world and they need to at least know what's going on."
[02:18]
He argues that modern Western society's disconnection from historical sexual norms leads to confusion and societal instability.
Austin Padgett echoes this sentiment, comparing the current environment to "studying Sodom and Gomorrah" without a proper frame of reference:
"[...] it's like trying to figure out the rules of a system through looking at studying Sodom and Gomorrah."
[05:12]
Lynch introduces the concept of archetypes, drawing parallels between masculine and feminine energies across cultures:
"In the Hermetica, it's an increasing life force and life charge. And the way to do that is to cross masculine and feminine energy. And so it's the yin and the yang."
[07:08]
He posits that sex throughout history serves as a manifestation of these archetypal dualities, influencing societal evolution.
The hosts discuss the breakdown of traditional male-female relationships in modern society, attributing it to the erosion of archetypal roles. Lynch references Amore Durian Core and his analysis of how racial and cultural biases skew our understanding of "normal" societal structures:
"Because we've so warped the frame of comparison, we exist vastly outside the mental model of what a normal human society should look like."
[05:12]
Padgett adds that without clear societal standards, modern relationships suffer from misaligned expectations and increased competition.
Lynch provides a broad historical overview, contrasting Western European societies with others in terms of gender treatment and societal organization. He highlights:
Hunter-Gatherer Societies: Contrary to popular belief, many were misogynistic rather than gender-equal.
Longhouse Cultures in Southeast Asia: Characterized by strong communal living and significant patriarchal control over women, often leading to practices like temple prostitution.
Axial Age Religions: The rise of monotheistic and rational traditions (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) shifted societal norms towards objectivity and away from earlier, more fluid sexual practices.
"In pre-industrial societies, the family was the dominant economic unit. ... So that because we have the shared values and shared genetics, we can probabilistically make an outcome of a certain child."
[29:26]
The conversation shifts to the 20th-century Sexual Revolution, examining its short-term increase in sexual freedom followed by a societal backlash:
"The sexual revolution radically increased sexuality in the short term, and then it crashed because you removed stabilizing mechanisms."
[165:26]
Lynch draws parallels to the Mouse Utopia experiment, suggesting that without societal constraints, sexual behaviors become chaotic, leading to societal collapse.
Addressing recent trends, Lynch and Padgett discuss declining birth rates, the rise of individualism, and the resulting mating crises:
Declining Birth Rates: Citing China as an example, they note the societal anxiety stemming from low birth rates and the aging population.
Mating Market Failures: The breakdown of traditional relationships leads to increased sexual anxiety, reduced deep relationships, and a rise in superficial interactions.
"The problem we're facing now is sort of a market failure. And boomers don't get market failures. And we're experiencing market failures demographically, sexually, economically, and sociologically."
[66:11]
Lynch explores how different cultures and religions have historically regulated sexuality, often intertwining it with power structures:
Ancient Civilizations: Practices like temple prostitution in Babylon and the enforcement of sexual norms in Rome.
Modern Western Christianity: Transitioning from ancient practices to a more regulated view of sexuality, emphasizing marital fidelity and condemning acts like adultery equally across genders.
"Marital rape only existed in the late 20th century and in medieval norms, for example. And it's not just sexual..."
[98:58]
In concluding the episode, Lynch emphasizes the need to rebuild societal structures that honor both masculine and feminine archetypes to restore balance:
"The answer to evolution is being a chad."
[165:20]
He advocates for groups of "higher men" to re-engineer society and prevent the metaphorical demise akin to the Mouse Utopia experiment.
Padgett concurs, highlighting the urgency of addressing these crises to avert further societal collapse.
Looking ahead, the hosts tease the next episode focused on "The History of Mysticism," promising to continue their exploration of foundational societal themes.
Rudyard Lynch:
"I think the culture of hiding sex from children is not good."
[02:18]
Austin Padgett:
"It's like trying to figure out the rules of a system through looking at studying Sodom and Gomorrah."
[05:12]
Rudyard Lynch:
"The answer to evolution is being a chad."
[165:20]
This episode of History 102 offers a provocative analysis of the interplay between sex and power across historical and modern contexts. By intertwining anthropological theory with historical events, Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett provide listeners with a framework to understand current societal challenges related to sexual norms and gender relations. Their exploration underscores the importance of archetypal balance and the potential consequences of societal shifts away from established norms.
For more insightful episodes and discussions, subscribe to History 102 on Turpentine's website and follow along on YouTube.