William Costello (3:19)

Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Tanya. And to add a few more evolutionary perspectives to that, I was listening to the podcast from the journalists who did the research, and I was just banging my head against the wall thinking, there's so much evolutionary psychology at play here, you can't see it. There's also an error management perspective. So everything in evolution is a trade off and between costs and benefits. And for most of our evolutionary history, women were making the trade off that they were benefiting by selecting men who would be able to provision them with resources and be able to protect them. Now those are no longer as salient as benefits to modern women who are earning their own money, achieving their own status, and living in a pretty safe world, even if they don't always feel it's all that safe. So those are no longer really key benefits that men can provide. So they're looking for men to provide other benefits that they're just not stepping up to the plate to do. So if you think about it from an error management perspective, the costs of selecting a bad mate still are exactly the same as they were throughout ancestral history for women. But the benefits just so that basically the juice is not worth the squeeze for modern women. So, like I read the article and our lab focuses on sexual conflict. And one of the solutions to sexual conflict that we always kind of promote is to try and encourage cross sex mind reading. For the last number of years, I've tried to get people to see it from the men's side that, oh well, imagine how it would feel to suddenly be asked to provide value in ways that you don't really know how that your status, you're being outpaced in status and you can no longer add value in those domains. But now I'm trying to put the cross sex mind reading hat on and imagine it from the woman's side and from a trade off perspective in terms of mating. They're living up to their side of the bargain. Men value physical attractiveness far more than women, and that was one of the key benefits that women provide as a mate. Modern women look better than ever, right? And they're bringing more to the table. They're actually contributing resources and status as well. And it's not like men hated those things and only liked physical attractiveness. They just didn't.

Chris Williamson (5:33)

It's a bonus.

William Costello (5:34)

It just wasn't as key a benefit as it is to women. So men are getting more and more from women, whereas women are getting less and less and they're looking for different things. And that was the key thing that came through, is that the traditional benefits that men were providing were no longer ones that modern women were looking for. They were looking for things like shared political ideals, emotional intelligence, things like that, even humor and stuff. And I think that modern men are just a little bit lost. But there is, there is a way back for them to provide value in different ways. But it's just the case that modern women are happier to choose singlehood than risk choosing a costly mate. And if you look at modern relationships, there's this pathway towards a long term committed relationship that has to go through this ambiguity, that goes through this kind of uncertainty of dealing with boys going on these dates, getting spurned by men. Because the modern mating market allows for deceptive men to pursue a deceptive strategy at unprecedented rates. It's incredible. You have unprecedented levels of anonymity, access to millions of potential mates. So for the first time in history, you can actually pursue a purely short term deceptive mating strategy without weathering many of the classic costs that you would have. Her kin and her friends are no longer really going to take revenge on you because you live in a city millions of miles away from them. They don't know who you are and you just move city. And a lot of men are pursuing this strategy. So women are thinking, if that's the pathway towards a committed relationship, I'd rather not because they're not getting the benefits.

Chris Williamson (7:28)

So the pathway to get to a relationship is laid with all of these different tripwires that you can kick. And women are worried about kicking one or many of them. Or maybe have in the past and have gone. Actually, I can support myself financially, socioeconomically without this. But I guess the rubber's gonna meet the road eventually. Because unless you're gonna do IVF sperm donor, you need to have a partner eventually if you ever want to have a family.

William Costello (7:54)

Yeah, but it's just the case that women's status seeking goals have become very important to them. They've been crushing it in socioeconomic arena. And it's a fact that getting with a long term male partner is a massive hindrance to a woman's career. He's not really going to want her to be around Other high status mates and rivals at work. He's not too crazy about that idea often. He often wants her to stay home and be the caregiver. That's often what she wants when she gets into a long term relationship. So if you culturally lionize. I know it's a bit trite to say like the girl boss culture, but that does clash with relationship formation. It takes time to pursue a career and it's just those two things are at odds. My mother famously said, actually women can have it all, but just not at the same time. So that's a bit of modern wisdom from Mami Costello.

Chris Williamson (8:49)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. One in four young women say that their partner having a different political view to them would be a red flag in a relationship. However, on political, particular political issues, women's stance is more hardline. Six in 10 say they would find it difficult to date someone who disagreed with them on the Palestine Israel conflict or did not share their views on Donald Trump. 74% say they'd find it difficult to be in a relationship with someone who did not share their views about social justice. Young women are also more likely than young men to say they would not have a relationship with someone who disagreed with them over immigration.

Freya (9:20)

I mean, that's so interesting to me because I feel like my generation's view of morality is basically these far away conflicts in the Middle East. It's things that aren't happening to our lives directly, but we seem to have this thing where we will treat how men behave as their sort of personal preference. It's, it's their subjective judgment on things. So it's like a morally relative culture. And so the only way we can judge a man by his morality is is he posting about Palestine? How does he feel about immigration? Because you can't say this is right and wrong because we're not as religious anymore. We can't really say that there is morally good and morally bad. And so we have to use these really easy kind of signifiers of morality.

Chris Williamson (10:09)

It's the foam finger waving on social media, right. Of what can be easily identified, what can be easily advertised.

William Costello (10:17)

I thought it was funny when I was listening to the podcast that these women, their activism is very important to them and they were very frustrated at what to me sounded like classically male, typical status driving, even in these circles. So there are some men who are going to identify this as an opportunity to woke fishing. Woke fishing, that's a nice term for it. But the women were complaining that the patterns of behavior they were engaging in, they were very Interested in giving the speeches, running for positions of leadership. And I was like, it's all just a different type of status game. And the same frustrations with men will exist in these domains as anywhere else.

Chris Williamson (10:57)

Why do you think it is? There's this sort of lean to the left when it comes to women. What's in a female disposition predisposition that seems to have this sort of progressive list at the moment being very compelling.

Tanya (11:13)

I think it might have to do with. If women evolve to evoke care, then, you know, and signal their vulnerability, then it would make sense from a niche construction perspective that you should design a world that gives aid to the vulnerable. You know, so, like, it's aid in your interest to design a social world that transfers resources to the vulnerable because you're going to see yourself as vulnerable. Yeah. And so it can be, but I also think it functions twofold. It's both beneficial for them, but it's also a signal of their kindness. And other women really dislike unkind women or any signs of cruelty, competitiveness. And so what I kind of wonder is like, is this all a competition to display to other women? I am so pro social and kind of. And then maybe your romantic partner is a reflection of you. So it's a stronger signal that I'm committed to these causes if my romantic partner also is, or if I don't have one altogether because they're not good enough, you know, so like, I'm willing to pay.

William Costello (12:13)

The honest signal of I'm foregoing a romantic partner because there are none who meet my standards on this measure. And with kindness, usually there's target specificity, that women usually prefer a partner who's really kind to them and they're less so keen on a partner who's kind to others. But accept if there's a massive status associated with someone who's kind to others, and that is in this arena, in this political arena, signaling your kindness to others is the high status, kind of

Chris Williamson (12:41)

encouraging a bit of domestication as well of everyone around you. It's interesting that a lot of men's behavior, men's portrayal of emotions are actually quite antisocial. You think about frustration, agitation, anger, rage, aggression. They're very antisocial. Joe Hudson's daughter was crying in the bath when she was nine. And it kept happening over and over. And he came in and he said, you know, when you're crying, you sound like pretty agitated. Are you sad or are you pissed off? She said, I'm pissed off. It's like, well, if you're pissed Off. Why are you crying? I said, well, because when I cry, my sister comes and gives me a hug, but when I'm angry, she runs away. The antisocial element of anger or of sort of more male typical emotions. At least women, when they get angry, sometimes they cry. Sometimes men cry too, but less so, right?

William Costello (13:33)

And this was a frustration that the women had about the men in these activism circles. They said that their solutions to the problems of seeing a sad story coming out of Palestine was to mobilize some logistic help. And the women said that they wanted an outpouring of. Involved in the emotion, sit in the emotion.

Chris Williamson (13:52)

One of them said, the guy was trying to organize the protest for tomorrow. I just wanted to sort of get on with the crying or the business of crying, not the business of activism.

Freya (14:00)

I think that explains why we have a proclivity toward progressive politics, because as you said, the social contagions that spread online and online, you're encouraged to ruminate and overthink and dwell on these issues. And so if you're. If your reaction to something is anger and a practical solution, that's not going to spread as quickly online as all of these girls coming together and saying, isn't it so bad? Isn't it so awful? And then one upping each other as who is the most emotionally affected by the issue.

Chris Williamson (14:29)

I said this before, when I'm in a room with guys that are big into conspiracy theories, that there is this sort of race to the bottom of the iceberg for who can have the most insane conspiracy theory. So it's like, oh, dude, do you think that there's an ice wall about Antarctica? Let me tell you about the woolly mammoths. Oh, do you think there's woolly mammoths, dude? Let me tell you about. And it just keeps on going and keeps on escalating in that way.

Tanya (14:49)

Weird.

William Costello (14:51)

We're very shameful.

Chris Williamson (14:52)

In a second.

Tanya (14:52)

Sorry, sorry, Ms. Andria in the corner.

Chris Williamson (14:56)

It's just. I mean, you must have been around this same. It is a weird sort of like entropy toward insanity or toward the most extreme position. And this is kind of the same, but it's entropy toward empathy, pushing as hard as possible into the. I am. I couldn't even leave the house because of how distraught I was about this particular issue.

Freya (15:18)

And then intersectionality, which is like, oh, you think this issue is bad? But I've looked into it from this angle, and I know this from this.

Chris Williamson (15:25)

You're just black. I'm black and a lesbian. I'm black and a lesbian with a

Freya (15:28)

Woman or you're a feminist but you don't think about trans women. There's always another way you can make it more neurotic and compete over that.

Chris Williamson (15:37)

What do you think? You know, you were saying the previous ways that men were able to add value and advertise their mate value to women has sort of fallen away. What do you make of the Lux maxing movement?

Tanya (15:48)

I kind of wonder if it's a reflection of. So there's this general trend towards the gender egalitarian paradox where as the world changes treats men and women more equally, the sexes diverge more. So they do it on personality, they do it on. Yes, men actually get taller and more equal environment.

William Costello (16:09)

It's hard to say that's socially constructed. Although people do say that. They say oh parents just feed the boys more. And that's the only reason in a more egalitarian. Yeah, it's okay.

Chris Williamson (16:19)

But anyway, but anyway.

Tanya (16:21)

So like you see this pattern in both men and women. Men get more like risk taking. Women get more anxious and depressed. So what I think is going on is, is in this like I think maybe gender egalitarianism is just like a proxy for social competitiveness. So as the world gets more competitive, our sex specific adaptations get activated. And so if it's the case that you know women are more prone to like anxiety or depression, that's gonna become amplified. If men are more prone to risk taking or maybe conspiracy theory that might get activated and then where's Lux mexing come in? Looks max. I mean men and women have incentives to both enhance their appearance to the extent that they could, it's just through different techniques. So men might have a drive for muscularity so you know it that would allow them to be competitive in a really competitive world.

William Costello (17:10)

Especially if the mating market is becoming at first more short term mating oriented. If there's this first pass of kind of somewhat short term mating oriented relationship that becomes a long term one then physical attractiveness which we know is massively over indexed in online dating and kind of the media saturated world. We even have data. I know you spoke Macken about this about just people are prioritizing physical attractiveness. Both men and women are prioritizing it more and more.

Chris Williamson (17:39)

Why do you think that is?

William Costello (17:40)

Because probably they're not able to add value in those other ways. The short term mating kind of attributes become more enhanced. And especially if you have a the kind of the visually saturated world online dating, I think that's, that's the first gateway to jump through. Then you need to meet the Minimum threshold on physical attractiveness. So it makes sense that men will increasingly engage in looks maxing. Now there's some predictable effects that we might see there and I think we are seeing them is that men tend to be a little extreme with their status, driving, with any pursuit to get sexually, socially, everywhere they're gonna go to extreme lengths. And that's what we're seeing. Right, you're seeing like the looksmax, the high profile looks Maxers now by the way, I don't think luxmaxing is that bad. I think that microdosing luxmaxing is probably good for everyone.

Chris Williamson (18:31)

Going to the gym is for a guy getting a haircut. Mark Manson's Models came out in what, 2014. Have you ever read that book? Probably not. So Mark Manson, before he did the subtle art he wrote Models and Models was like a sanitized pickup book. It's the best way to put it. And then Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Max did mate. So the two car garage for guys, it gets a bit old. It's kind of showing my age weirdly because they're both written in the teens or the tens Mate by Tucker Max and Jeffrey Miller and then Models by Mark Manson. But in models it's like you should get a T shirt that fits nicely. Pick grays and navies and blacks and you should get a pair of jeans that don't hang off you and you need a nice belt. It's like the most basic but that's too a guy in 2010. That's Luxmax. Yeah.

William Costello (19:15)

And men can move the needle on their image pretty quick. Like good haircut, getting good shape and wear a fitted clothes, little bit of stubble, you're gonna kill it. Like that's a massive improvement. But I think what happens is men, given their tendency to go extremes and from an error management perspective they go too far with the muscularity and things like that because. And there's lots of data to show that they go too far and it's not what women like. Mental reliably overestimate the muscularity that women want. But I think of that from an error management perspective as well because simultaneously we do have lots of data that women do like muscularity. So if you're going to make an error on one side would you rather

Chris Williamson (19:54)

be and it'd be more muscular than less muscular.

William Costello (19:57)

Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Chris Williamson (19:59)

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William Costello (21:16)

Oh yeah, I asked whether and I chose. I've really enjoyed Twix bringing in the pictures with the poles now. It's really a nice little addition to the polls which I'm an aficionado of.

Chris Williamson (21:28)

Well, you need to fucking get off Blue sky, dude.

William Costello (21:29)

Yeah, I'll get off Blue Sky.

Chris Williamson (21:30)

My main piece of advice to you is to leave the fuck away or

Tanya (21:34)

do the polls on both and compare the results.

William Costello (21:37)

I have no following on Blue Sky. It's just you go on, there's dozens of people that are there, they have no interest.

Chris Williamson (21:42)

You go on there as a form of self harm.

William Costello (21:44)

Yes, I think you're right. Yeah. I do try and reach like both sides of the academic kind of world.

Chris Williamson (21:50)

But they hate you. I know, but they actively hate you. All that happens in our group chat is he posts like, he. He basically comes in for kind of like emotional support. Where is emotional support? Group chat.

Tanya (22:02)

Lovely.

William Costello (22:03)

Men show their emotions.

Chris Williamson (22:04)

That's true. That's not. You're not showing your emotions, you're showing how you're being repeatedly beaten by the same social media platform. It'. Insanity.

Freya (22:11)

Why do you get attacked just because you're into evolutionary psychology?

William Costello (22:15)

Yeah, more kind of narcissism of small differences about evolutionary psychology I'd say. Yeah, it's a. But anyway, the polls on X are my fund. I love them. Yeah, the whole Ollie Murs situation went viral for that but one I've done recently. I posted a picture of Clavicular who's the most high profile looks maxer and I think a pretty handsome guy. He's one of the only looks maxers that I think looks pretty good but I think he looked pretty good to begin with so I think he was gonna be handsome anyway. But anyway he's the most high profile looks maxer and I posted a picture of. I can't even think of his name but he's a popular K pop singer that's a bit of a heartthrob in that arena. And reliable sex difference. The men thought clavicular was more handsome, the women thought that the K pop star was more handsome. So there is a somewhat of a mismatch in cross sex mind reading happening between men and women around attractiveness.

Chris Williamson (23:09)

What do you think about the guys that say well that's just stated versus revealed preferences. Women actually do want the Gigachad face. They don't want to go with that. Sorrybo. That's just what they think is popular to say online.

William Costello (23:21)

I think it's massive cope for people to respond to all my polls with oh you can't trust anything women say that they just lie all the time. That must be such a comforting world to live in to be like oh I don't have to worry about any of their criticism because it's just lies and I know how they really behave. This is often said by just basement

Chris Williamson (23:41)

dwellers, people who don't go off the Internet.

William Costello (23:43)

Yeah, exactly. So I would say that the K pop star does pretty okay with women I imagine if he is so inclined I think he would be fine. But yeah, the key point is I think men overdo it with their looks maxing. They could hit a sweet spot because the signaling effect that they're giving by being too into looks maxing is kind of negative to women. I'd love your opinion on this but I think it signals that they're active in the mating market. They're looking for other mates, they're self obsessed, they're gonna be not willing to have a takeaway on the couch with me on a weekend. They're gonna.

Chris Williamson (24:18)

It's the dad of four who's still in shape somehow.

William Costello (24:21)

Yeah, it's a bit sus, isn't it? And even it is a sign of infidelity predicts infidelity for guys suddenly getting back in shape. It's like he's trying to re engage with the mating market. Ladies.

Freya (24:31)

I also think it's feminine coded and so it's. It looks to me like the male symptom of social media addiction where you see girls editing themselves, getting cosmetic surgery, obsessing over aging. Have you seen these girls when they go to bed and they have like a sheet mask on?

Chris Williamson (24:48)

And then I've seen the red light thing.

Freya (24:50)

Yeah. But they have like a hundred different things going on.

Chris Williamson (24:52)

There's a post maybe in Slate or Wired about this girl who had a hundred step beauty regime, stuff like that. I spray the magnesium on my face before. I think she was sitting under a lamp that's meant to keep bird eggs alive. She's like putting her face under a lamp like a fucking heater that you would put food on a hot plate under.

Freya (25:13)

Yeah. But I think if you see that you'd think she's very neurotic and maybe not a good part. If she's like obsessed with how she's

Chris Williamson (25:20)

going to but because the baseline for men is supposed to be lower. Even if a man doesn't have a hundred step thing, if he's got a ten step thing, that's still quite a lot.

Freya (25:28)

Yeah. And it just looks like, as we were saying before, it looks like teenage girls on Instagram but then applied to. It's how young men are reacting to the incentives. Like you said on dating profiles, they've got to advertise themselves like a product. But I think it's also just social media in general because when you match with someone on a dating app, the first thing you do is look up their Instagram. And that Instagram has to show like they were just saying that they're a good person. You've got to see evidence of that. You've got to see all the holidays that they've been on. Are they social? And all of these things have to be marketed immediately. And so I think that is where a lot of the looks maxing comes from.

Chris Williamson (26:06)

So I was at dinner with you know, signal from X Trends all the time. Fucking sick. I went to dinner with him last night. I didn't know who he was. Just this like a non. I could have been abducted last night. We turned out to be really interesting guy and now we're friends and I was going through my little bit about What I think is happening with Lux maxing that guys have a failure of cross sex, mind reading about what other women find attractive. And what they're doing is they're basically coding for other men's formidability and respect, not for female attractiveness. Because there's evidence that suggests that women prefer a slightly feminized face, a neutral or a slightly feminized face with a masculinized body. But when you look at some of the lengths that the guys are going to with the jaw surgery, gonna get comical. Hasn't yet for clavicular, but I think he's having jaw surgery today.

William Costello (26:52)

Oh, no.

Chris Williamson (26:53)

So like, I don't know, this week. Oh my God, another one.

William Costello (26:55)

Overdose two days ago.

Chris Williamson (26:56)

Yeah, that's. Well, maybe that might be. You could just build the overdose into the jaw surgery and just steam straight through it. I don't know. But after a while, the guys are kind of overshooting. Overshooting the androgyny, like the really intense cheekbones and the huge jaw. And again, you can say, well, women don't really know what they want. They do want the Gigachad. Something tells me not across all of the different studies that have been done about what is preferred by men and women. You know, it'd be an awesome thing to do. You should do this. One of your polls should be, take Clavicula's face now, run it through coves, take it to machina, whatever. Get them to feminize it a little, get them to masculinize it a little. Get them to masculinize it more. And say of these, and don't say which one is his, because that would kind of blind it a little. Anyway, so I'm explaining this. I'm like guys, because they maybe haven't been around women because they're not women. They're just. What would women want? Well, they would want what I would think is attractive or respect worthy or whatever. So I'm just going to like optimize for the androgyny thing.

William Costello (27:55)

Yeah. And to men, the ultimate reward is short term mating success. They hate being told, oh, you're the

Chris Williamson (28:01)

guy I would marry, but not the guy I would have a one night stand with.

William Costello (28:04)

That was a massive bingo.

Chris Williamson (28:05)

Fucking bingo, dude.

William Costello (28:07)

So men are optimizing. Well, if women like Chad at all, they want him for short term. Yeah. And that's true. There's some evidence that women prefer masculinized just specifically in the short term context. So given that that's the ultimate reward for men, they're thinking, I Can pursue that.

Chris Williamson (28:22)

I'll optimize that. So signals thing. His point was he thinks because all women are basically scrutinized in group chats and living on Instagram and if you go on a date with someone, all of the people in the group chat are going to ask what's his Instagram? Yeah, guys are optimizing to be as presentable as possible. So the self beautification that men are going through right now is basically them future proofing themselves from the girl they're going to go on a date with. Group chat, scrutiny of his Instagram.

Tanya (28:58)

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson (28:59)

Does that make sense?

Freya (28:59)

Yeah, yeah, I think that is true. Well it's like the app, you know, the T app.

Chris Williamson (29:03)

Yes.

William Costello (29:03)

Are we dating the same guy?

Freya (29:05)

Yeah, but you can like literally rate and review men based off pictures of themselves and like rate them a green flag and a red flag. But that is happening in group chats. And I think a lot of young men think even before they've met someone, all of their memories have to be marketed in a way for a future partner who's gonna be scrolling through their life. So it's like, yeah, when you go on holiday, capturing images not for the memories but for this future woman who's gonna be scrolling through your profiles.

William Costello (29:32)

Interesting. That's a nice segue into the mate copying of Nikki Glaser. Have you heard about that?

Chris Williamson (29:37)

Was this the call her daddy thing?

William Costello (29:38)

Yeah.

Chris Williamson (29:39)

What happened?

William Costello (29:40)

So she had an interview where she kind of revealed her. I wouldn't describe it as a cuck fetish but she kind of told.

Chris Williamson (29:46)

Was it not called Monopoly? It's Monopoly.

William Costello (29:48)

Monopoly. Well that's a cool term, Monopoly. Yeah. So she basically described that she enjoys seeing her male partner fuck other women. Now she's not into being with other men. And this is this very kind of salacious story. And I think there's a number of things happening. There is, there is some evidence of mate copying that's much stronger in women. The social proofing of other women's opinion of a guy, it's pre selection is way more important to them than it is for a man. So let's say I was going out with someone that I was head over heels with and in love with and you said no, no, she's not that beautiful. It would have less of an effect on me than it would for a girl having all her girlfriends to say no, he's not the one, he's trash.

Tanya (30:30)

And it makes sense because women's mate value is more observable. Like so you can only do so Much. You know, you have eyes like, I don't care.

William Costello (30:38)

You think I can see. Yeah.

Tanya (30:39)

Whereas men's mate value is less observable. So you have to use these indirect

William Costello (30:43)

cues, like their partners into a club and he's surrounded by four women. Some women are looking at that, saying there must be something. Or if he doesn't look that good, but he has a really beautiful partner, they're thinking, there must be something. He must have something going for him. Right?

Chris Williamson (30:59)

Yeah, there's a. I was talking to Coleman Hughes and he was telling me about when he first started dating his fiance, maybe in New York somewhere. And he'd be sat down at a table and some guy that read his book or listened to his podcast or whatever would come over and be like, Colin, I just wanted to let you know I'm such a huge fan of the podcast. Podcast and whatever. Sorry for. Sorry for interrupting. And I hope you have a wonderful night or whatever. Would you mind taking a photo? And Colin was like, there is no better wingman. I've just recruited some guy that I don't know that is a fan of my work and I'm really glad to have as a fan. But I'm even more glad that you spotted me in this steakhouse with this girl. And yeah, there is this. That's why I think the black pill ruling of lms. Yes, lms. If you get the. If you don't hit the minimum level of looks, you are going to be at a serious disadvantage that maybe doesn't get to enter the party. But beyond that, I don't think it's m next. I think status counts for so fucking much. It's able to wipe away. Because how long have we had money? How long have we had status?

William Costello (32:03)

Yeah, absolutely. And especially when too much physical attractiveness can actually be off putting to a female partner, they're like, oh, I don't want to have to make guard him that hard. And he's too obsessed with himself and too many women like him. It can be off putting. Is that right?

Tanya (32:18)

I get stressed out about men who are too attractive or too extroverted. Don't trust it.

Chris Williamson (32:23)

Why?

Tanya (32:24)

I just know they'll have so many alternatives and they're more likely to encounter them. It's like it's a numbers game. Even if you're really desirable at some point, I mean, they. People habituate. So it's just. It's risky.

Chris Williamson (32:38)

There's a relationship between infidelity and extroversion, right?

Tanya (32:43)

Yeah. And I kind of wonder if that might play a role into, like, why women show some of these traits is like, there was an incentive from men to not be super extroverted. High confidence. Because if that's a cue of sexual

Chris Williamson (32:57)

pronoun, dad, not Chad.

Tanya (32:59)

Well, no, for women, if women are too extroverted, other men might infer she will cheat. And if men have the concern over paternity, certainty, and cuckoldry, then they might have preferred women who were slightly more insecure, more humble. Right. And so women might have encountered mate preferences that selected them to be slightly more insecure. It's less threatening from a mating perspective.

Freya (33:24)

It is interesting, though, because I feel like at the moment, my generation of young women are, on average, very insecure about how they look, and they're very anxious. But they also seem to be louder than ever in terms of, I'm empowered, I'm strong, I'm independent. And so you have women who are really trying to portray that they never get jealous and they never get insecure, but then they seem to have this deep risk aversion and anxiety, and I don't know where that comes from.

Tanya (33:49)

There are some studies where women who are really agentic and assertive, if they're negotiating, they experience backlash where people don't like them, but not if they're negotiating on behalf of someone else. So I kind of wonder if it's like the only way women are allowed to be, like, tough and agentic is to be an advocate for some moral cause for someone more vulnerable. It's like the only way you're allowed to be. Because it seems like that's the domain where you see women all of a sudden be very hostile when you don't get that hostility in any other context. And so maybe that's the one domain where people allow it.

Chris Williamson (34:22)

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Tanya (36:08)

I don't know. I think in a lot of ways, like the modern world is more conducive to women's traits than men's. Like we're not allowed to be aggressive. The only way that you can be aggressive is very subtly which women are experts at. Yeah. And so, and now in a workforce you probably are rewarded for being the egalitarian boss or the one who checks in with their employees. So like, over time, as we move to like a prestige based competition system that's more conducive to a lot of women's traits than a dominance based competition system. But I see your point that at the same time you also have to be like agentic and assertive in the workforce. So it'd be really interesting to see how women navigate that in practice. But there are some data showing that more agentic women are particularly disliked by their female colleagues. And so I think that might lead to women's using these egalitarian strategies as a way of like simultaneously being competitive and assertive while looking kind along the way.

William Costello (37:04)

And I think you could say for good reason, the modern world or workplace is Kind of designed to neuter men's most aggressive tendencies. You can't exactly get into a physical fight to settle something anymore in the workplace. It's just not acceptable. But you can spread gut gossip and that is kind of rewarded. So in that style of aggression, women will far succeed.

Chris Williamson (37:26)

Have you ever done any bless his heart stuff?

William Costello (37:30)

Men do gossip too, right? It's not like just a female thing.

Tanya (37:33)

Yeah, we try. So we manipulated whether a man said it about another man or a woman said it about.

Chris Williamson (37:38)

Can you do. You're going to have to just give a 30,000 foot view of the bless her heart effect.

Tanya (37:42)

Okay. Basically, if women phrase their negative gossip with concern, people didn't register it as gossip. They were more likely to believe that she was a good person. And so it seems like you get these benefits by believing you're concerned about your gossip target or maybe doing it consciously. And then there was a different study where we did look at men and women, where we looked at women's use of like complaining, venting about their friends, like complaining about how their friends treated them. Like, oh, you know, Susie always says these weird comments to me and they hurt my feelings. If men did that, other people didn't care as much. So it just doesn't work.

Chris Williamson (38:22)

Yeah, yeah, it is, it is. It's non agentic in a way. Right?

Tanya (38:26)

Yeah. They don't have the same sympathy in terms of bless his heart. Maybe it would work for men because you're just seeming compassionate. I don't know if we did. It would be interesting to test.

Chris Williamson (38:36)

There's a substack called Men are Good. Have you come across this

William Costello (38:41)

Sounds controversial.

Chris Williamson (38:43)

It's really well written. I mean look, it gets a bit men's rightsy, but some of the insights are fucking money. Like really, really good to golden. I think he's called good. Really?

William Costello (38:53)

Name rings a bell.

Chris Williamson (38:54)

Really good substack. Anyway, he had this one bit where he talked about how men are told that they should open up more about their emotions. But every single incentive pretty much pushes against it, including that of other men that men don't like to see men who are opening up about their emotions, there's a kind of ick and an aversion like you look like an unreliable ally. You're not maybe thinking this consciously, but two things are true that men are trying to do at the moment. It's like men's mental health is a really big issue. But okay, if you see a guy that's crying on social media, will you give him sympathy or will you laugh at Him. Almost every guy is gonna go, simp cuck, soy boy. You're an idiot. This is lame. You need to man up. It's like, okay, so which is it? And we spent two hours talking about some of the paradoxes of sort of modern female culture and capitalism versus independence and freedom versus motherhood and just a mom and all this stuff. I think it's important to call out the ones where guys. You do not get to say, men need to open up more. Men, we need to have more services for mental health. Let's say that men don't believe that, because a lot of men might say, men don't need to open up more. They need to man up more. And you go, okay. Do you think that suicide prevention is something that's important? Okay. How do you respond when you see a guy that's incredibly depressed on social media and really struggling? Because, what is it? 95% of men that took their own lives had sought mental health advice from the exact services that they're supposed to in advance. Presumably if you're remotely online and young, you've maybe tweeted or posted something that's a bit sad. At some point, have you checked in on your bro? Like, if you were at dinner and one of your friends started crying, how comfortable would you be at sitting in that? Especially if you're British? It's like. It's just not. It's not a conducive environment. So men want room for their. Their struggles to be acknowledged, but when other men are struggling, they don't acknowledge their struggles. Does that make sense?

William Costello (40:50)

This is where I think the insight from our ancestral history and the selection pressures men and women faced is so informative.

Chris Williamson (40:56)

William, you just fucking put a billboard above your head that says, evolutionary psychology is real.

William Costello (41:00)

It's coming. Right? Okay. But no, the specific pressure. So men have this deep ancestral history of coalitional value to each other. So to express vulnerability is a massive liability and risk to you and to your allies. So the message that I think struggling men that would be more effective than, oh, you can come cry on my shoulder, is we need you, actually. And you're valuable, useful. You're useful, and we need you to be stronger. So whatever you need to do to get back on your feet, and I know you can do it. You just gotta rally. We've all kind of been there that

Chris Williamson (41:33)

I feel will resonate with you much more compelling. You know what's a good example of that? That New York divorce lawyer was on the show a couple of. Couple of months ago. James Sexton Yeah, James Sexton. And he was saying to me, he told me this story about he was in a relationship with two different women, one after the other. As a divorce lawyer, that would be a high risk strategy. No, it would have been safe. So both women didn't like the fact that on a weekend he doesn't shave. He has to shave every single day before he goes into court because he doesn't want to look stubborn. And then on Friday or Thursday night, he would shave and he wouldn't shave again, maybe until a Monday morning. So by the time it gets to a Sunday, he was real scratchy. And the first relationship he was in, the woman said, it irritates me so much it makes my face red. It makes me break out in spots, and I really don't like it. And I wish that you'd shave. It doesn't make me feel very good. That relationship didn't work. Next woman had the exact same preference, but instead she said, you know what? It is so sexy when you're clean shaven. I think that it's just the hottest thing in the world. Immediate.

William Costello (42:41)

I'm doing it right now. I love to have my hair buzz cut short. The fade for about 15 years. I'm doing the bro flow now because my miss is just is insistent upon it. So.

Chris Williamson (42:51)

But she hasn't said, I hate you with short hair. She said you're hotter with.

William Costello (42:54)

Not quite.

Chris Williamson (42:56)

She said that you're hotter with long hair.

William Costello (42:57)

Yeah, she prefers the long hair.

Chris Williamson (42:59)

Yeah. But prefers the long hair as opposed to doesn't like the short hair. You know what I mean?

Freya (43:03)

Oh, okay.

Chris Williamson (43:04)

Well, fuck. I feel like, do we need to do an intervention?

William Costello (43:06)

She's qu. A domineering woman.

Chris Williamson (43:08)

Yeah, yeah, I've met her. She wears a lot of leather.

Tanya (43:11)

Yeah, But I like that about, like, I think men do respond to encouragement. And I love that about male friendships. Like, if you ever see men in the gym, they'll be honestly giving each other feedback on how to improve, whereas women will be, like, not commenting on each other's form and just chit chatting about their lives. And so it seems like men really want each other to be better because if that's your, like, brother in arms, you need him to be the best soldier he can be. And so it's so funny because if you listen to, like, male directed podcasts, they're always like, how to maximize productivity. And, you know, and then female directed podcasts are like the exact opposite. They're like, you're a queen no matter what you do. If he doesn't recognize it. Leave him. And so then it makes me wonder like if we're receiving this feedback from our same sex peers, what is that going to do to men and women over time? Men are going to go into looks maxing, finance maxing, and then women will just go into like wallowing. Like it.

Freya (44:06)

Yeah, I feel like women don't. Wouldn't call each other out either. So if like a young woman posted on social media that she had this horrible experience with a man and it was kind of unfair toward the man, the comments are all going to be in support of her because if she's say, crying or she's upset on camera, we're all going to co ruminate together and then also confirm her maybe neurotic assumptions of what's happened. Whereas I feel like with men, as you said, it doesn't engender the same empathy. And so maybe they would have a load of comments.

William Costello (44:36)

Men prefer the tough love. So there's this new trend I've got where I retweet kind of these random masculinity behaviors as tonic masculinity. And one is this guy, he was morbidly obese and he was gonna die. Like he was really that severe. And his friend text him every day, you fat fucking pig. And the guy loves his friend. He's like, like, he saved my life. He literally like just doing that, checking in with me every day, saying, you've

Chris Williamson (45:04)

had checking in with me?

William Costello (45:05)

Well, like it worked. Like he said, if he cares enough about me, he needs me to be better. Yeah, yeah, like that was it. It was.

Freya (45:11)

Whereas women would be like, you look better than ever as queen.

Chris Williamson (45:16)

What does it engender for women as you look at sort of the next generation? The best thing about this, you know, critical drinker, he had this fucking awesome take. So he compared the first Mulan movie, which was the Disney animated one, to the live action one that came out maybe five, six, seven years ago. And in the first one, the protagonist is smaller and weaker than all of the men and she needs to disguise herself and she has to use feminine guile and agility and speed and she has to work even harder. And eventually after doing that, she's able to become the hero. And it's kind of a female story of self empowerment through determination and agency and working hard and stuff like that. That roll the clock forward by two decades. The protagonist is immediately better than all of the men. She doesn't need to work at it. The only, the only restriction that she encounters is the fact that the World doesn't believe in her enough. She. Mary sue, she's got some like, Mary sue some.

William Costello (46:14)

A character who's just already perfect.

Chris Williamson (46:16)

Okay, yeah, that's like Wonder Woman 1.

William Costello (46:19)

No, not the Skywalker film.

Chris Williamson (46:22)

No. What's the one in Avengers that can like fix everything thing?

William Costello (46:25)

Wonder Woman. No, not Wonder Woman. Ms. Marvel or.

Chris Williamson (46:28)

Yes, Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel is like, she's like off saving other shit in the universe. And you're like, hey, hey, hey. Thanos just killed 50% of everyone. It's like, no, there's other problems elsewhere. And she's like the most powerful of all the superheroes. Anyway, second Mulan movie. She's got this magical estrogen chi, whatever it is. She's got like some super feminine thing that she's able to just use and she's immediately better. And you go, well, when I think about if I have a daughter, which I hope to, what role model do I want her to have? Do I want her to believe the worldview that the only time that you encounter obstacles is because of something systemic that's out of your control because the world doesn't believe in you? Or do I want her to believe that you can overcome stuff just the same way that the men can and that if you do encounter obstacles, that's par for the course. There's no entitlement. There's no. This isn't something that's wrong. The world is filled with problems. You just need to work out a way to solve them. And you can. Not that they're a bug, but they're a feature.

William Costello (47:28)

And it's also quite sexist because they lionize the male default. So if a woman shows male typical behaviors, that's how she shows she's kick ass. If she shows feminine guile, like you said, that's not quite the same. They don't want to promote those gender typical behaviors.

Chris Williamson (47:42)

I came up with a name for it. The soft bigotry of male expectations. And you remember when there was that hunter gatherer, a paper that came out,

William Costello (47:49)

perfect example of it.

Chris Williamson (47:50)

Can you explain what that was? When it was reanalyzed and then reanalyzed again.

William Costello (47:53)

So they tried to present data to show that oh, the man, the hunter is basically a myth and that loads of cultures have women as the hunters in the society, but they were really coding their data where any society that a woman did any hunting at all, a rabbit, one rabbit killed, that is coded as woman was hunting as well. Even if men were by and large

Chris Williamson (48:17)

responsible for 364 days of the year they were doing it.

William Costello (48:20)

Yeah. And what's really annoying is there's actually a really cool story if you look at our hunter gatherer past, is that women contributed as many, if not more calories to the society through their gathering. And that's cool, but it's sex specific. But it's just as good. You don't have to be just the same as the men to be as good or, or good in a different way. It's like it's actually really sexist because they think you have bigotry.

Chris Williamson (48:45)

It's a fucking massive amount of bigotry that devalues what would have been whatever female coded behavior. And this is the line from Andrew Schultz where his wife, who used to work at Google, had their first kid and would then be walking around the supermarket near where her ex co employees and colleagues would walk around. They say, what are you doing now? And she'd say, I'm just a mom. He said it was the just that killed him. That there's something about doing something that was inherently female coded that was seen as less valuable. You go, how is this not sexist? Is this not fucking sexist to say the thing that came to you naturally, the gathering as opposed to the hunting? Well, women can do it just as much as men and maybe sometimes even better. And you go, well, yeah. But that implicitly devalues the thing that they were doing more often of. It's like, it's very, I don't know, it feels like bigotry to me.

William Costello (49:38)

Is there something going on whereby like feminine guile is meant to be kept mysterious and you don't want it said out loud the way you do things or something.

Tanya (49:47)

I don't know, I just think like maybe it's like an assumption that like women are a block, a monolith, when in reality women have competing interests. So like feminism isn't operating on behalf of all women. It's really good for hyper agentic women. It might be penalizing the women who are more female typical, who are more nurturing, who want these things. And so it's kind of tragic that like as a result of championing these women, we have to also like denigrate these women. And it seems like, like if you really wanted to be pro women support them in whichever direction they take.

Chris Williamson (50:25)

For a community that's trying to be very inclusive, it's highly exclusionary.

Tanya (50:29)

Yes, yes, yes. To critique some women for wanting like love and babies, it's like, that's beautiful. Support all types.

Freya (50:38)

I also think it's because we, we have a somewhat therapeutic culture now where the ultimate goal for women is like self actualization. So it's becoming their authentic selves. And that's why you see these storylines in movies where the woman is basically trying to find her authentic self and then everyone else is a distraction and an obstacle. The men then become obstacles and it goes back to the begin of the conversation with marriage and women having a negative view of men and the risk aversion because they will be an obstacle to their self actualization. And that is now the ultimate mission.

Chris Williamson (51:13)

There's a moment in the second Doctor Strange Marvel movie where a zombie version of Benedict Cumberbatch goes back in time to tell the female protagonist, who is a Latina daughter of a lesbian couple called America Chavez, that she just needs to believe in herself. Like that's where she's the most power. She was born as the most powerful person in the world and she's got this thing, but she just didn't believe in herself enough. And that kind of goes to the podcast thing, which again, like it just to me, it feels really patronizing to tell women that you're perfect as you are, like you are are immutable and the world is mutable. You don't need to change yourself. The world should bend around you. Whereas male podcasts say the world doesn't give a single fuck about you. You need to do everything you can to try and counteract this entropy locally, bro. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me five years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day, and it's made hitting my nutritional basis an awful lot easier. AG1 includes 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food ingredients. And that is why I've been drinking it every running for over five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 Next Gen, the same one scoop ritual, but now backed by four clinical trials. In those trials, AG1 was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, boost healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, and improve key nutrient levels in just three months. They've been refining the formula since 2010, 52 iterations and counting. And I love the Next gen because it's more bioavailable. It's clinical validation, which is unbelievably rare in the supplement world. The older I get, the more I realize that the small stuff compounds. And this, this is one of the smallest things I do that makes a massive difference. If you're still on the fence. They've got a 90 day money back guarantee in the US so you can buy it and try it for three months and if you do not like it, they'll just give you your money back. Right now you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3K2 AG1 flavor sampler and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com modernwisdom that's drinkag1.com

William Costello (53:24)

modern wisdom on the topic of sexism, Freya, I'd like to put you on the spot a bit.

Freya (53:30)

At the moment they're calling me a

William Costello (53:31)

sex I would include you. Well, we'll see. I want to ask you a few questions. You've been described as the voice of Gen Z women, so this would be very interesting to get your opinion on these questions. So I'm going to read them up to you. So Tanya, I already know what you think because we're working on this together. So is it closer to sexist towards men or women to believe the following things? 1. Women have a superior moral sensibility.

Freya (53:59)

Sexist toward men? I would say.

William Costello (54:01)

Okay. Women have a quality of purity few men possess.

Freya (54:06)

Sexist toward men.

William Costello (54:08)

Women have a more refined sense of culture and taste.

Freya (54:11)

Sexist toward men.

William Costello (54:12)

Okay, full house. Sexist towards men. Next set of questions. We're almost done. Do you think it would be a good or bad thing if men mostly agreed with the sentiment of the following statements? A good woman should be sat on a pedestal.

Freya (54:29)

Good.

William Costello (54:30)

Okay. Women should be cherished and protected by men.

Freya (54:34)

Good.

William Costello (54:35)

Men should sacrifice to provide for women.

Freya (54:37)

Good.

William Costello (54:38)

In a disaster, women need to be rescued first.

Freya (54:41)

Good.

William Costello (54:42)

Every man ought to have a woman he adores.

Freya (54:44)

Good.

William Costello (54:45)

Men are complete without women or men are incomplete without women.

Freya (54:50)

Yeah. Good.

William Costello (54:51)

Despite accomplishment, men are incomplete without women. So same.

Freya (54:55)

Yeah.

Tanya (54:55)

Good.

William Costello (54:55)

And people are often happy without romance.

Freya (55:00)

Bad.

William Costello (55:01)

Okay, you are a massive benevolent sexist. Those are the items on the Benevolent Sexism scale, and I polled all my followers on this and they, like you, believed that the statements were either sexist to men or a good thing. Right. So it kind of begs this question of what is the scale measuring? So this is an idea that Tanya and I and some other colleagues are working on that we call the Mismeasurement of Men. Now, that title is strategic because there was a famous book called the Mismeasure of Men by Stephen Jay Gould, who was very critical of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary approaches to human behavior, and we think it's the precise opposite that's happening in scale development in psychology now that a lack of insight into evolutionary psychology and just science in general is creating these crazy, problematic scales. So you've got scales that are measuring toxic masculinity, benevolent sexism, and male sexual entitlement that are actually problematic in so many ways. But one of the ways is they're measuring awareness of facts about the world. So one of the items is women are often attracted to muscularity and dominance. And that's taken as evidence of toxic masculinity. And there's no attitude added onto that inference. It's just. Do you know that that's sometimes the case? And it is sometimes the case. These. These scales, they're like what I call the Cathy Newman of scales. They require an extra inference about the implication of agreeing with the statement. So you believe that women deserve to be protected. Oh, so what you're really saying is they should have their autonomy limited to keep them safe for their own good. And it's like, that's not measured. So it's a total mismeasurement of men. And it also pathologizes women's own preferences. So women have strong preferences for protection and provisioning yet, and men care about being seen as attractive to women, so they're gonna prioritize that over being seen as sexist. So it's a huge problem. We see. But, yeah, sorry to tell you, if you're a man.

Freya (57:10)

So is that the same as internalized misogyny?

William Costello (57:13)

Same concept, not quite the same. So benevolent sexism is one end of the scale of what's called ambivalent sexism. On one end of the scale, they have hostile sexism, which is like, direct antipathy towards women to be like, oh, women are trash, basically, like, really direct and obvious. Whereas benevolent sexism is this more subtle, putting kind of infantilizing of women, which I believe could be a real concept. But when I looked under the hood at these items that were used to measure it, I couldn't believe it. I just thought that they're absurd.

Freya (57:46)

Well, that reminds me of the New Statesman piece, because the New Statesman piece basically concluded that liberal women are unhappy. And then everybody was basically. We spoke about this. They were saying that this is. No one's spoken about what's going on with liberal women. This is new. Like the new statesmen are the first to have the balls to say it. No, but the interesting thing is, is that I sort of get viewed with the internal misogyny thing, because I will say the same thing, which is Liberal women are unhappy. But I'll also say it's because they have these unmet needs. It's because they want to belong. And it's like a compassionate worldview that I. I think women want to be protected. They want to feel like they're safe and stable and all of these things. But then I get the. That's a sexist point of view. But the New Statesman can present it and say young women are unhappy and draw different conclusions. And then it's not a sexist point of view.

Chris Williamson (58:40)

Your female privilege has been revoked. You don't have the female privilege that you once thought you did.

Freya (58:45)

Because I'm white? Always accepted.

Chris Williamson (58:47)

Because you're white. Because you're right of centered.

Freya (58:49)

Yeah, yeah. I'm. I'm. I. Then don't get treated as a woman at all.

Chris Williamson (58:54)

No, you're an honorary man. Congratulations. It's three on one.

William Costello (58:58)

So in the literature, there's this kind of confusion about. Oh, women are perplexingly attracted to benevolent sexism. And this is like a problem. It's an inconvenient finding. But when you look at the way the items are written, it's needless because I think women are attracted to men who believe women should be protected, but I don't think they're attracted to men who would add on the extra inference and would say, oh, because women need to be protected. They need to have their rights.

Chris Williamson (59:24)

Autonomy should be.

William Costello (59:26)

So if you had the item written in a proper way and the scale designed in a proper way, you would actually have no problematic attraction to benevolent sexism.

Chris Williamson (59:33)

Do you remember that video of the two travelers in Thailand and a guy pulls out a knife? It's CCTV footage.

William Costello (59:41)

I think I've seen it.

Chris Williamson (59:42)

Yeah, it went super, super viral. And all of the replies and all of the, quote, tweets of it were, girl, he's trash. So this guy pulls out a knife and he's trying to steal the woman's bag, and she fights him off. And the guy hides behind a fucking pillar. The dude hides behind a pillar. So there's two things that are sort of, yeah, icky, right? And we all have this sense that you should protect. Dude, what was that fucking thing that I said? I put this in the group chat six months ago and I fucking called it. And I was right about the fact that women would be less. There would be more. Oh, here it is. Look at this.

William Costello (60:14)

Oh, no.

Chris Williamson (60:16)

So that guy's got a knife.

Tanya (60:19)

Oh, my God.

Chris Williamson (60:19)

Homeboy hides. Homeboy hides behind the pillar while she is fighting him. And there's another dude that just comes over and maybe he's with the guy and then this guy with the fucking

William Costello (60:29)

benevolently sexist man over and thinks the woman cannot defend herself and. What a sexist son of a bitch.

Chris Williamson (60:36)

I know. What a piss pig.

William Costello (60:37)

Yeah.

Chris Williamson (60:38)

On an absolute pig. Is it the dude on the bike? I think it's a.

William Costello (60:41)

He comes in with a helmet.

Chris Williamson (60:42)

Yeah, dude, a helmet to the head.

William Costello (60:44)

Commute to the helt.

Chris Williamson (60:46)

Yeah. So almost everybody was universal in this. That guy that's hiding behind the pillar is. What are you doing, dude? Come on. Like, yeah, it's a knife and I'm fucking scary or whatever. But like, do something.

William Costello (60:58)

Women's preference for protection is seriously strong. So I ran a poll asking which would have a stronger effect.

Chris Williamson (61:05)

This was my idea. Don't fucking say I would ran a poll. This is my idea, dude.

William Costello (61:10)

Okay. I was even surprised by the results. Women said it would have a stronger effect on their attractiveness to a man if they found out he was unwilling to protect them than it would be if he cheated on her in a one night stand. Yeah. Really strong.

Tanya (61:26)

I kind of wonder if, like maybe that's one factor in why women are. Aren't interested in men nowadays is like men don't get to display those abilities.

Chris Williamson (61:33)

Like if no one's coming back from war.

Tanya (61:35)

Yeah. If we're not seeing men defending our groups or hunting. Like, you don't get to see the value of male formidability or the display of it. I. What I'm starting to wonder is like if women even realize how much stronger men are. When I ask my students, like I present this sex difference in upper body strength and they're surprised and I'm surprised, like, what?

William Costello (61:56)

There's this viral trend on TikTok apparently now where it's like asking couples to ask the guy to go into the challenge of putting her in handcuffs in 30 seconds and they're like, it's the greatest foreplay ever. It's like women get so turned on by a realizing the strength difference is crazy.

Chris Williamson (62:14)

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing that Andrew Thomas was talking about. Does Andrew do Krav Maga or some shit? He does some kind of some martial artsy thing, Right. And he's saying that the ability to turn on and turn off aggression is really rare. Most guys, the aggression sort of bleeds out in the same way as your level of obsession and how much you pay attention to patterns is great when you're trying to write a new piece, but is not so great when you're dealing with your intimate relationship or whatever. Guys that are aggressive, good. If homeboy comes along with the knife, forget running away, he's licking his lips and the guy's like, oh, I've been waiting my entire life. And then just pulls out an armory of things to kill him with. You're like, okay. Everyone's like Tim Kennedy. But very few people have learned, very few men have learned to turn that off. And I think what women. What's got crossed over a little bit here is that women love the idea of a man who is able to be aggressive, but never to them. And unfortunately, the guys, I mean, how many MMA fighters have had like, awful abuse, domestic abuse situations that you've selected for a guy who is. He is gonna really, really stand up for me. Well, yeah, but maybe that's also. That's not to say that all fucking MMA fighters are gonna be, you know, home abusers. But this has happened a bunch of times. You go, it's hard to turn that aggression off. And the protector thing is great, but the just raw regression thing carries on.

William Costello (63:43)

It's a trade off women have to make. And it's predictable, the ecologies in which they'll actually select a really formidable mate. And it's predictable based on the individual differences in that woman's size. Smaller women in those dangerous ecologies tend to have a stronger preference for really strong, aggressive.

Chris Williamson (64:00)

What would a dangerous ecology in the modern world be like?

William Costello (64:02)

So, I mean, there's rough areas of. I used to live in Birmingham, there's rough areas of it.

Chris Williamson (64:07)

This is as rough as it gets. Yeah.

Tanya (64:09)

We did a study where we tried to see this, like, we tried to think about. So we had them learn about, like, imagine your friend Sarah tells you about an experience with her boyfriend, and in one condition, the boyfriend and her are in a fight and he gets so mad that he punches a wall. And then in the other condition, the boyfriend defends her against this guy coming, trying to rob her. And we thought it was gonna make. When we primed women to think of like the man as the aggressor punching the wall, we thought women were gonna dislike the formidable men, but they had the same preferences as normal, where they were totally fine with the formidable guy. But we did find when we primed them with the protector condition, they liked all men more. So, like all men. And so. But to your point, like, I think, like, maybe women aren't aware of those trade offs totally because those two men

Chris Williamson (64:57)

are likely to be the same person.

William Costello (64:58)

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson (64:59)

The guy that's really, really competent and prepared to go for it in the protection thing. Maybe he's gonna punch a wall as well.

Tanya (65:07)

And they weren't registering it as like, well maybe I should use cues of formidability as a predictor of like, which men would be likely to be violent. And so it was odd that they didn't show that aversion. And so I'm not sure if that link is like as explicit in women's minds.

Chris Williamson (65:22)

Isn't it strange as well that there's a, especially among young girls, the sort of Gen Z girls or I guess maybe more like Gen Alpha. Now if you look at the phrenology of the guys that they're trying to go for, guys are almost signaling like anime character levels of, of cuteness, the tously hair, the very sort of thin body. Certainly there's the lux maxing teens that are going in the other direction that are basically trying to speedrun manhood.

William Costello (65:48)

The soft boy.

Chris Williamson (65:49)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that what the aesthetic is?

Freya (65:52)

Yeah. And I think that's because it's less threatening.

Chris Williamson (65:54)

Exactly. Bingo. Bingo. Post. Me too, world. This guy, he couldn't even force himself on me if he wanted. Like there's no reason. He's basically like a cuddly teddy bear best friend that I get to be in a relationship with. With.

Freya (66:05)

Yeah.

Chris Williamson (66:06)

But when you think about like, what is that pushing toward? Well, at some point those women are probably going to diverge away.

Freya (66:15)

And I think that's what Jordan Peterson used to say about you don't want to dominate your partner. So it's not a good long term strategy to have a partner that you're not, that you don't find threatening at all and would never protect you and that you can dominate because you don't want to be in a relationship where you're controlling.

William Costello (66:29)

You see them as a child. Eventually.

Chris Williamson (66:31)

Well, this was the. Who's the blonde researcher lady that did the Come on Face.

William Costello (66:38)

Catherine Salmon.

Chris Williamson (66:39)

Catherine Salmon.

William Costello (66:40)

Fucking research on the come on Face.

Chris Williamson (66:43)

Shout out Kathryn Salmon, dude, she fucking rules. But she was talking about how after 50 Shades of Grey came out and the dark romance genre really started to pick up steam, which obviously I contributed to. And there was a world where this was politically inconvenient, especially for the sort of feminist side of the aisle, because all of the guys that were being chosen to be the protagonists were highly dominant, highly assertive, tall, strong, masculine, millionaire billionaire CEO people. So they tried to put more pliable. They were called golden retriever husbands or cinnamon roll husbands. And they tried to put sort of A more soft, pliable guy on the COVID And also the story throughout out shock horror. They didn't sell well. And this is short term mating and fantasy. The same way as what a man watches in porn. The porn that I watch, I might be great porn. Or the sex dolls might not want to. Might not want to be in a marriage with her. Right. Tell me about sex dolls, your specialist subject.

William Costello (67:46)

Yeah, I was glad to make the shift from incel researcher now to sex doll researchers. I've got the full GAMU and they actually kind of of connect in a way. They're the main consumer base of sex dolls. So I came across this amazing.

Chris Williamson (67:59)

That's a unfortunate way to open the sentence.

William Costello (68:01)

Let me rephrase that. I happened upon this amazing data set that was publicly available that had all the body specifications of sex dolls that are on the market. And this study that was published was very descriptive in nature and it was just describing the dimensions rather than saying why they might be that way. So I did a kind of my own analysis on it and showed that they reveal all the kind of classically predicted male mate preferences. And it's interesting because these artificial depictions of female sexual beings are like a undiluted window into men's mate preferences. Because these dolls, they can take on any form. They're not limited by nature. They're just literally whatever the consumer wants them to be like. And there's this. It's not just that the creators of sex dolls make them that way and the consumers have no choice. There's this co evolution of the market with the consumer and the producer. A good example is they wouldn't buy

Chris Williamson (68:56)

something they didn't want.

William Costello (68:57)

Exactly.

Chris Williamson (68:58)

Right.

William Costello (68:58)

There's no market for really obese sex doll. Well, there's a smaller market, let's say.

Chris Williamson (69:03)

Yeah, there's a niche for everything. Brilliant.

William Costello (69:05)

But, but, but the dolls typified all the classic evolutionary predicted made preferences. But. Except they did so in an extremely supernormal stimuli way.

Chris Williamson (69:15)

So have you got images of. Can we pull this image up?

William Costello (69:17)

I do have an image I did send through my image.

Chris Williamson (69:21)

Here's something that you prepared earlier from your armory of sex dolls.

Tanya (69:25)

It reminds me they're these beetles that will try to mate with glass bottle bottles. Yeah. And I would show it to my class and I'm like anyone who watches porn, that's also you. It's the same thing.

William Costello (69:38)

Convinced.

Chris Williamson (69:38)

I'm gonna fucking. I'm gonna say it. I think that romantasy is for women what porn is for men.

William Costello (69:44)

Yeah.

Chris Williamson (69:45)

You know, there's A great video of this dude. And the woman's saying she's comparing Disney movies to real life. And she's like, the dad's gone, the dad's gone. She's alone and the dad's gone. And, like, all of the problems that Disney princesses had to go through. And the dude does it with like a court of thorns and roses. And it's like, he's got a big thing. He's got a big thing. He's got a big thing and something in his eye. He's got a big thing and he can fly as well. Like. Like there's another one that I saw of a girl talking about what I read in my Romantasy novel. And it's, I would wait until the death of a thousand suns just to get to touch your cheek one more time. And then it cuts to what she's got in her real life and it's like the trash is smelling again, right from her partner. But unrealistic expectations for what are the key triggers for romance and attraction and stuff like that. That supernormal stimuli is everywhere, dude, even in Romantasy.

William Costello (70:40)

Yeah. And one of the kind of the white pills on it is that it's still really low status for the guy to be a sex doll Haver. I mean, it's very embarrassing when you start talking about your collection, Chris. It kind of does lower your status.

Chris Williamson (70:51)

My collection is just Deborah, so I just have one and it's Deborah, so.

William Costello (70:55)

Oh, my God. But yeah, but for now, it's low status to have sex dolls, but maybe that'll change in a way.

Chris Williamson (71:02)

I don't think it's going to change because there's no selection. It's the same reason that guys can't flex the amount of onlyfans that they subscribe to. You can get something that everybody else has. Especially in a market where getting something that no one else can get is highly valued, it's seen as desperate. If I can see you naked for the price of a cheeseburger per month, that's not going to be high value. It's going to suggest, oh, I can't get this, really, so I'm going to have to get it privately.

William Costello (71:29)

But maybe a subset of men will say, ultimately, I don't care about the status now. I'll just compete. This will satisfy my sexual urges more and more convincingly. When you integrate AI into the system, maybe they'll just retreat into that world and video games will be their other status game.

Chris Williamson (71:46)

They will Internet male sedation, dude. Male sedation turned up to 11. Jared, I want to see these sex dolls. Where are they?

William Costello (71:52)

While he's searching for that, I'll tell you an interesting story that I learned when writing this paper is it's actually confusing from one level of analysis why women have smaller feet than men.

Tanya (72:03)

Men.

William Costello (72:03)

But it's a sexually selected feature because adult human women are the only species, the only mammal that carries a pregnancy on two feet. And it's really dangerous to have falls. It might terminate the pregnancy. So you'd actually expect them from a biomechanical perspective to have evolved really big feet for stability and all that, but they don't. They have really small feet. And men have a preference for small feet. And it is a sign of femininity because with each age and pregnancy, women's feet get bigger and bigger.

Chris Williamson (72:32)

You're fucking kidding me.

William Costello (72:33)

Yeah. So they have small feet.

Chris Williamson (72:35)

Okay, so if you're a slightly older woman who's, who's had a ton of kids, big feet.

William Costello (72:40)

Yeah.

Tanya (72:42)

The same is true for women's faces. So men's preferences, well, actually like what we view as attractive in a female face is like neoteny looking like a child. And if you amp up those features, they're the same features that make people want to take care of babies, also make women more attractive and people want to help women more. So they're like, like just selected to be neotenous.

Chris Williamson (73:03)

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William Costello (74:51)

But women are fulfilling their part of the bargain. If you looked at it from a trade off perspective, women are here's my beauty, here I'm contributing, bringing more to the table financially and everything. The women, if you ask them, I bet they'd say yeah, well we're right, they're wrong or we're right and they're right.

Chris Williamson (75:08)

But why would you, why, why would you hold an actively negative view of men?

William Costello (75:12)

Well, because they see only the risks. They see the.

Chris Williamson (75:15)

But this is not an act, this is not a view of relationships. This is an actively negative view of men. This seems to be much more judgmental. Men are bad in and of themselves. Men are bad over there or they're bad when they're trying to get with me.

Freya (75:27)

Yeah, I would think that was something to do with porn because, and I also think that explains, you know, you say that women are attracted to sort of feminine looking anime men. I think because maybe they've grown up watching very hyper masculine like porn stars being really rough and violent with women and then they go for the non threatening mate and then also they develop this view of men based off maybe the most brutal videos and seeing it from such a young age that then you develop, you generalize that to all men.

Chris Williamson (76:02)

Don't understand why you'd be actively negative. 21% actively negative.

Tanya (76:07)

I wonder if it's that signal to other women that I'm team women. Although my student Michaela, she's designing a scale of opposite sex hatred. And what's amazing, speaking of scales. No scale exists to measure sexism in both sexes. So you can never. No one has ever compared whether men or women are more sexist. Guess which one is more sexist.

Chris Williamson (76:29)

Which one?

Tanya (76:30)

Women. Women hate men more than men hate women. Totally in line with that.

William Costello (76:33)

Which makes sense from error management perspective as well.

Freya (76:36)

But yeah, I also think something I've noticed is that young women are often again, because self actualization is the ultimate goal they're often deterred from committing and relationships now more so than young men. So if young men say that they're going to get engaged young, for example, other young men are usually happy for them, you know, like they've got out of the dating game and the dating market. If women.

Chris Williamson (76:59)

Saigon.

Freya (77:00)

Yeah. But if women commit early, other women express this fear for them, like, oh, you're going to give up some of your potential. And I think that's because we think that women had more to be liberated from. And so now if women close down their options, we see that as suspect and we worry for them.

Chris Williamson (77:20)

Well, also it depends if you get Danny Szilikowski pilled, it would be there's an eligible man that's prepared to protect and provide and he's now off the market. And it throws into harsh contrast the. I mean that was the whole variety piece about having a boyfriend is cringe now that girls didn't want to post about their relationship online because it made their single friends feel bad. If their single friends feel bad, that presumably is gonna show up at some point in the pushback online and they're gonna feel triggered by the fact that fuck. Like, it is tough. The dating world is tough, especially for young people at the moment. Especially for young girls at the moment. Right. They're trying to navigate this thing. We talk about the problems of the dating environment for men and thereby kind of miss the problems that women are facing in the dating market, including ones that are not self imposed, but they're at least like intrinsic. Either their uncertainty, their fear, their social anxiety, their worries about go of their freedom and their independence. Like these are real things. Whether they're manipulated or manufactured by a modern environment, there's still things that you have to navigate and that fucking sucks for women.

William Costello (78:27)

And I think the forensic kind of stalking that groups of women do on a potential new mate. I mean, even my girlfriend, she tells me about the deep dive she did on my years old tweets. Lucky to come out of it alive. Really.

Chris Williamson (78:41)

Yeah, yeah. Glad that she didn't go on your blue skin.

William Costello (78:44)

I know.

Chris Williamson (78:44)

Yeah. No one does but you're so bitter about Blue Sky. No engagement, apart from people that hate you. Dude, get off there. It's self harm torture porn.

William Costello (78:54)

But no, they really do this kind of collective, collective condemnation deep dive. And everyone is a little bit cringe in some way and you can find how they're cringe. So in some level you have to almost accept that your new boyfriend is a little bit cringe. And that's what I told my girlfriend. We're very happy together. Embrace. Embrace the cringe.

Chris Williamson (79:14)

Yeah. Tanya, what do you reckon about icks? Have you looked at, have you done any research on icks and stuff like that?

Tanya (79:20)

No, but there does, like anecdotally there seems to be a sex difference where like women get the ick and then men do not. Yeah. I wonder if it's like a absence of a sufficient, like you need at some threshold of masculinity and if you don't cross it then. Or if you indicate anything that violates it. But I don't know, Freya, you'd probably know what's the stronger predictor.

Freya (79:42)

Well, I'm not obviously an evolutionary psychologist, but I see it from a cultural perspective that you have so many messages coming at young women to be on guard, constantly on guard, like looking for problems. And so you have a feminist message that, you know, you have to be independent, you can't let a man get in the way of your goals. But then you also have a therapeutic message which is like, be on guard for any red flags, any signs that someone is not good enough or you're incompatible. And so I, I think young women might feel something like an ick and then they're encouraged, especially by social media, to take that feeling really seriously, which is like, if you feel some negative emotion toward your partner, you're incompatible or there's something wrong. And so I think we're just way more. We're bracing all the time to see the red flags.

William Costello (80:23)

And it also kind of announces, like you said, kind of allegiance to the sisterhood alliance, but also elevates their own mate value. It's like, oh, there's this. Just a total scarcity of guys in.

Chris Williamson (80:34)

My standards are so high. Things are so difficult. I have a refined palate. I couldn't eat. I wouldn't be able to eat at fucking IHOP this evening.

William Costello (80:44)

I always feel like that about men who say they have types. I'm like, I just don't buy it. Like, oh, I only like plants.

Chris Williamson (80:50)

Fucking. This was the, you know, of all of the things that I went through on Love Island. This was one of the weirdest ones, which is that you turn up one of the first questions that the press during your lockdown week and you're doing interviews and all of the interviews for the show. One of the first things is, is like, what's your type? What is it you're looking for? What's your. But not what are you looking for, it's who are you looking for? And maybe that would have changed 10 years ago when I was on. In fact, it was more than 10 years ago when I was on Love island now. Right. What's your type? What do you mean? Like, who is like oh yeah, it's, it's ginger girls with a blue. They have to have blue eyes. They can't be too blue. But like if they're a little. I'm like, who the fuck has these weird autistic preferences for a partner? Because they're only talking about it physically. They're never saying, oh, I want someone. I want someone who is really in touch with their emotions. I want someone who is. They wouldn't have even said I want someone who has these interests, like physically. What are you looking for?

William Costello (81:45)

I think it's just a way from in guys anyway. I think it's a way of just posturing like oh, I can be so specific and narrow my choice parameters so much because I have so many options and I've been always a little bit susa that I've never bought it. Yeah.

Chris Williamson (81:59)

Some of the new polling done. The New Statesman suggests that privileged women are the most pessimistic of all. Women in middle class professions are less likely to say they feel valued by society and less likely to believe that if they work hard they will succeed in life. When compared to their working class counterparts, young men are now more likely to be unemployed than young women. Yet young women are far more financially cynical. 21 points less likely than young men to believe they will ever out earn their parents. Parents. White women are more likely to feel the country is racist than their non white women middle class partners.

William Costello (82:32)

You white women are awful.

Chris Williamson (82:33)

Yeah.

Tanya (82:35)

I wonder how much of that is like related to that finding where the only way that women could be agentic was like on behalf of someone else. So like the more successful that you are or the more that you have going in your favor, the only way that you can be agentic is to be so deeply caring. There are some ethnographies on adolescent girls and the only ones that were allowed to be popular were if they were super, super nice. And so they had to kind of over deliver on kindness in order to be allowed to be popular. And so it feels a little bit like that same pattern that perhaps women do this so the envy or resentment of other women won't bring them down. Joyce Bennison has this hero friend of the show. Oh, she's the best. I'm obsessed with her. She has, has this paper on leveling showing that like, women are more likely to use a leveling strategy where they say, like, oh, we should all be equal when someone is surpassing them. And so I wonder if like, once you have all of these things operating in your favor, you kind of have to be like a martyr in order to like continue on. Otherwise people might.

Chris Williamson (83:45)

Where do you get your victimhood points from? I won't say who said it in our group chat, but someone replied to Rob Henderson bringing us up and said, middle class hay fever, Rob. When there's no high load of parasites, people's immune system gets bored and starts looking for things to react to. And you get allergies to dust and pollen. When the middle class has no threats, their threat system gets bored and starts looking for trivial things to blow out of proportion. White privilege, gender identity, ultra processed foods. It's all pollen. You don't have oat milk. You're traumatizing me. No. Explicit segregation and blatant racism. Sensitivity to microaggressions increase.

Freya (84:19)

That's what I was going to say is I think it's more time to introspect and ruminate because you have girls and young women not just picking up on icks in their partner and scrutinizing them and looking for flaws, but then doing that to themselves. So constantly pathologizing, diagnosing themselves, wondering what's wrong with them, over analyzing their personality traits. And so I do think it's just more time and less bigger problems like say, having children, where you put your neuroticism, you funnel it into something productive and instead it then, then turns inwards or also against your partner.

William Costello (84:53)

But there is status afforded to women doing that in that ecosystem, in that social system of higher education where women are dominating now, they're rewarded for espousing views like that. So, you know, they're showing that they know the ideology of the leading status people in their world.

Chris Williamson (85:11)

This is me showing fealty to the cause. I understand this thing.

William Costello (85:14)

Yeah.

Chris Williamson (85:15)

What's the data around men and women being demonized and seen as victims?

Tanya (85:22)

So we have some studies showing that like, we have this like kind of cognitive heuristic of victim and perpetrator and when men and women are, like, involved in any instance of harm, we're more likely to see women in the victim role and men in the perpetrator role. We're more likely to blame men and more likely to have sympathy for women. And so it would suggest, like, perhaps some of the reason we don't see a lot of sympathy for men is it's like, cognitively harder to see them as victims. And then for women, it's just cognitively easier to see them as victims. And so we feel that sympathy, but this is. It kind of sucks for both sexes. So in the domain of harm, men are disadvantaged and they're not seen as victims. But for women in the domain, in other domains where you'd want to be the agentic person, like a. If you're deciding on a CEO or a president, women aren't seen as as agentic and as capable. So it's not like one sex is clearly doing better than the other. They're both facing these like, one doesn't

Chris Williamson (86:23)

get sympathy and one doesn't get belief. Yeah, I guess that's one of the challenges I think, that women face when they go into the workplace that they feel like if they need to be assertive and dominant, they have to temper the throttle of it a little bit for fear of being bitchy. They don't want to be a bitch. Right. Or a D. Yeah.

Tanya (86:39)

I feel like there's like an agency warmth continuum, and women are expected to be here. And if they go farther along agency, they're seen as low in warmth, bitchy. But the same is true for men. They're higher on the agency side. And so if they show warmth by crying, they're not seen as. As competent. So, like, we're both encouraged to stay in our lanes.

Chris Williamson (86:58)

But if women show too much warmth, they seem as pliable and not competent because it seemed that people that are a little bit more. More brusque as seen as higher competence. Right. Warmth is negatively associated with competence, I think.

William Costello (87:11)

And I just think this kind of protectiveness that we have about women, it just gets repackaged as oppression in a way. And I get that you could be paternalistic and overly. And a lot of kind of, you know, abuse of women does occur under the guise of for their own good and protection. But it is astounding the extent to which we are more protective of women than men.

Chris Williamson (87:35)

You have to really contort yourself into a lot of knots to see the women are wonderful effect and think of it as oppression toward women. Do you know much of the Stats around the women are wonderful effect. Like all of the different ways that people prefer women to men.

Tanya (87:52)

I know one study that looked at this kind of where they looked at job hiring discrimination, and it's gone down against women. But people overestimate its presence and so they assume it's still there, even though the data suggests clearly it's not. So it's like we're almost like just sensitized to detect it.

William Costello (88:10)

Even if it's not there and even when you learn about some discrepancy, if it's against women, people are up in arms about it. But if it's against men, it's like no biggie.

Chris Williamson (88:20)

Is attractiveness under acknowledged as a kind of privilege?

William Costello (88:24)

Oh, I think so, yeah. So on both ends of the spectrum. So the pretty privilege, which also has its costs. There's costs associated with being seen as pretty. Other women in particular see you as more promiscuous and things like that. But there are enormous benefits across the board to being attractive, male or female. But then at the other end of the spectrum, there's enormous cost to being unattractive. And there is new research that shows that we're not readily able to recognize this form of privilege. We acknowledge other forms of privilege, but attractiveness, we're reluctant to acknowledge that it even exists. Exists. And we also have evidence that women are far more attractive than men. It's not just one OkCupid study, loads of data unpublished from our lab finds this attractiveness discrepancy. There's tons of data. Women are just more attractive. So arguably a feminine advantage in the domain of attractiveness, when that can be translated into so many resources. There are studies to show that beauty is status for women. Women defer to more beautiful women, women in the way that men defer to more formidable men. So this is an advantage. And it could be another thing that's actually a less acknowledged point about what's putting women off having children is that they hear these horror stories. They literally have to take a massive beauty hit. And that's just. There's no way around that. Less than they've ever had to take. But it's still there.

Chris Williamson (89:46)

It's so funny that having kids. Kids would impact your beauty, but the effect of pretty privilege is denied and hidden. Yeah, it's like, well, you. If that is playing into it, you have to admit the fact that it's there.

William Costello (90:00)

Yes.

Chris Williamson (90:01)

You know, yeah.

William Costello (90:01)

Yeah. I don't yet think people would acknowledge at face value. That's one of the reasons. Well, you do see them sometimes. Women Are like, I'm not sacrificing my body for that and you know it. We have new data come out that shows that relationships, having being a parent, similar levels of happiness to not being a parent, greater levels of meaning for the parents, especially for women, but lower relationship satisfaction for the parents. So it does take a toll on the relationship, but certainly on the woman's mate value thereafter, having the kids, the toll it takes on her beauty. So you can kind of see why women, if there's all these benefits, they can translate their beauty, which is their status, into they'd be reluctant to sacrifice all that.

Freya (90:43)

Yeah, I mean this is kind of what we were talking about before, which is that I think social media platforms have incentivized women to see themselves less as human and more as products. And so their life becomes about marketing themselves and optimizing themselves. And so I think, yeah, having a child disrupts being the perfect pristine product. But then we're in this really weird scenario where don't you want to look good in order to reproduce and have children at base level? But now Instagram comes along and Instagram, it gives women so much dopamine and status that then that becomes their higher priority.

William Costello (91:19)

Yeah, because it's a misconception about evolutionary psychology that we have these fitness optimizing mechanisms. We actually have. We're adaptation executioners. So it's not like. It's just that behaviors that over evolutionary time would have resulted in more offspring are passed on. So women still have the desire to have sex for the most part with people don't come into the world with, oh, I really want to increase my reproductive success, I want to have offspring. But they do want to be seen as a high mate value to others have sexual urges and over time those things would have resulted in reproductive success. So now it's a bit of a mismatch.

Tanya (91:58)

Joyce Benenson, she has this cross cultural study where she shows among young people, one of their primary goals is finding a romantic partner, but one of their lowest goals is having kids. And so she makes this argument that, that we probably evolved a desire to attract a mate, but we didn't need to evolve the desire to have kids because so long as you were having

Chris Williamson (92:19)

sex, you were having kids, didn't have reliable contraception.

William Costello (92:22)

Yeah, it's a hugely evolutionary novel technology that's really just thrown the whole thing up in the air.

Freya (92:28)

I think also with young women, sometimes the relationship becomes an accessory to display online.

Chris Williamson (92:33)

What was your line about that in the episode that we did a couple of years Ago it was relationships are just brand partnerships now.

Freya (92:40)

Yeah, yeah, it's something to display and so the characteristics that maybe you would select for before social media are very different now it's presenting it to other women and how other women will react. Seeing your launch of a partner online.

William Costello (92:56)

Yeah, the soft launch, hard launch. Learn all about this stuff.

Chris Williamson (92:59)

60% of romantic relationships begin as friendships. This making the world harder to date. Clayton?

William Costello (93:06)

Well, given that there's fewer and fewer cross sex friendships, I think it should be celebrated that this is an avenue towards relationship formation. And you know, the age old question of can men and women ever just be friends? We've just got a new paper accepted that shows that we call it courtship and cross sex friendship where men provision financially to their cross sex friendships that they're interested in making. 50% of people say they have romantic interest in a cross sex friend. The same number have had sex with at least one, particularly young people. So I do think it's a good pathway to relationships. And if you formed more cross sex friendships it would be a direct route to relationships because attraction grows over time. You get, you know, proximity breeds intimacy, but also you get to display a lot of the same qualities that make for a good mate, make for a good friend too. And men and women select friends who have the same qualities that they want in a mate. So protection, physical attractiveness, resources. So it's a good pathway. But the secondary route is it broadens your networks and it also helps you learn about cross sex mind reading. So it's very hard to actually, you know, come to the boneheaded beliefs of some of the red pill, black pill world world online if you actually have in real life female friends that, you know, kind of disprove a lot of what, what you hear.

Chris Williamson (94:32)

I'm going to quote you back to you here. William Costello polled 527 heterosexual and bisexual people are opposite sex friendships ever truly platonic. 81% of women said yes. Only 58% of men said yes. Women were three times more likely than men to say their friendship was purely

William Costello (94:50)

on So I think it's a little. Women hear that and they sometimes get very upset that to learn that their male friends see them as that nearly

Chris Williamson (94:58)

half of your guy friends are trying to sleep with you would.

William Costello (95:00)

Well, not necessarily, it's just that they kind of would. So and this is the kind of the misconception that women maybe hear that and they think, oh, so he only wants to sleep with me and it's not quite the case that he probably would. Yeah. When people Hear about this for the first time and they doubt. I always say, just try it. Just try when you're out for a few drinks next time.

Chris Williamson (95:21)

Do you remember that one in the Economist? A study of Americans finds that in platonic couples, men are far more likely than the woman to find their friends sexy. And far more likely to think that she finds them attractive too. Indeed, a man's assessment of how much his female friend fancies him matches how much he fancies her and is entirely unrelated to how she really feels. Clearly, men are prone to wishful things.

William Costello (95:42)

Yeah. Yeah, well, men need to kind of pluck up the courage somewhere.

Chris Williamson (95:45)

And if everyone wants to be asked out more, that was your thing.

William Costello (95:47)

That's true also. So, you know, on the one hand, women want to be approached more, but then are kind of unhappy to learn that their opposite sex friends are interested in them. But I do think women keep some opposite sex friends as backup mates, too.

Chris Williamson (96:01)

Oh, there's something. You've got loads of data around backup mates. Come on.

William Costello (96:05)

But yeah, I just think ultimately we should celebrate and try and cultivate more opposite sex friendships because it could be a pathway to proper reasons.

Freya (96:13)

I wonder if on social media that disincentivizes opposite sex friendships because you live in different worlds completely. So we were talking earlier and you hadn't heard of influences that, like, shaped my childhood?

Chris Williamson (96:25)

How did I not know? Moella.

Freya (96:27)

Zoella, whatever. Do you know Zoella?

William Costello (96:31)

I've heard of.

Freya (96:31)

There we go.

Chris Williamson (96:32)

You're right. Sorry. You're an avid subscriber of Zoella, the program. You get ready. Did you get ready for today with Zoella? No, I didn't. A new try on Haul from Gymshark.

Freya (96:41)

But it's like Zoella, but also. Also Facetune. Facetune is a huge app among young women where they can edit themselves.

Chris Williamson (96:48)

I hadn't heard of it either.

Freya (96:49)

So I think one of the statistics in my book is like 70 or 80% of young women wouldn't post on Instagram without Facetuning themselves first.

Tanya (96:57)

Makes me so relieved to hear this. Every photo should have that attached to

Freya (97:03)

it, but it's been downloaded like hundreds of millions of times. It's a core memory from my childhood. But then. Then. So I write this whole book about social media and the experience for young women. But then for young men, they have a completely different childhood. So it can be a young man that grew up nearby.

Chris Williamson (97:19)

RuneScape playing RuneScape. You played RuneScape. You said that you're a bit more

Freya (97:24)

of a. I'm a bit more masculine. Yeah. But yeah, they will not even recognize things that were huge influences on young women. And so I wonder if we try and be friends with the opposite sex. It's like a whole different world. Because algorithm are suggesting you already didn't

Chris Williamson (97:39)

have that much in common and now you've got even less interesting.

William Costello (97:41)

Yeah, that's a good idea.

Chris Williamson (97:42)

What else are you brandishing? Some graph I can see that you've got on your phone there. What have you.

William Costello (97:46)

Did you find that sex doll yet?

Tanya (97:50)

I have a question about the opposite sex friends. Is there a sex difference in the degree to which our opposite sex friends match our mate preferences? Because if there's not. If both men and women are like designing their opposite or selecting opposite opposite sex friends based on their mate preferences, then when women say, oh, I'm not attracted to my opposite sex friends, is that true?

Chris Williamson (98:13)

I've seen data around this. I've seen data that shows that the same traits that you look for in a partner are the ones that you look for in your opposite sex friends. I've seen this.

Tanya (98:24)

So if men and women do that to the same degree, then is that really the case when women are saying

William Costello (98:29)

they can't be so shocked?

Tanya (98:30)

Yeah. Like, what are the odds that the

Chris Williamson (98:33)

tall, handsome guy that looks exactly the same as my actual boyfriend thought that?

Tanya (98:37)

Oops.

William Costello (98:38)

Yeah, but. But it's kind of like from a jealousy perspective, you know, you can see why it would be really jealousy inducing for a man for his mate to have opposite sex friends or work colleagues who are sharing, you know, a mission together. Like, you hear of these things of women calling someone their work husband. I'm like, disaster.

Chris Williamson (98:57)

No, do not do that.

William Costello (98:58)

Never say this. This is a bad idea. So I do think that men are inclined to kind of pump the brakes on women's careers for a mate guarding perspective. You know, that's kind of. And opposite sex friendship perspective as well. One more thing on the Look Smacking Chris is I thought it was interesting that. Did you see the Australian guy you interviewed clavicular? The look smacks her.

Freya (99:21)

Yeah, I was gonna say he's more effortlessly good looking.

William Costello (99:24)

Yeah, I think that's true. That for men to be handsome, it needs to be like, they didn't try.

Freya (99:29)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

William Costello (99:30)

Now I've done a little bit of a deep dive into that guy's Instagram and he certainly tries and he certainly knows he's a handsome guy and whatever, but he's definitely pulling off that effortless much more. But it's interesting that the commentary around him being clavicular Being mobbed by this more handsome Australian interviewer, It's kind of proving Clavicular's philosophy. Exactly correct. He's like, you're saying that he's more handsome, so he mogs me. That's my whole philosophy. I'm exactly right. It's all about looks.

Chris Williamson (100:01)

Why do you spend time with people like that? All right.

William Costello (100:05)

Have a nice day. Are you trying to.

Chris Williamson (100:08)

I. I see. You want to make this political.

William Costello (100:12)

Too bad.

Chris Williamson (100:12)

I. I didn't have time to. To look into, you know, anything about potentially, you know, who's.

William Costello (100:19)

Who your wife cheated with.

Chris Williamson (100:21)

But don't try to go down that line of questioning with me, all right? Because I'm not doing any political.

William Costello (100:28)

I'm not married. So I was.

Freya (100:31)

I was simply only asking because obviously,

William Costello (100:33)

maybe you got a looks max then, so I could.

Chris Williamson (100:35)

I could teach you how looks max then.

William Costello (100:36)

And then maybe you could switch that up.

Chris Williamson (100:39)

But thanks for.

William Costello (100:39)

Thanks for the time.

Chris Williamson (100:40)

Appreciate the interview.

William Costello (100:41)

All right.

Chris Williamson (100:43)

I mean, look, they did light them quite nicely, which was good. It was definitely quite a sultry. If that turned into gay porn, I wouldn't have been surprised.

William Costello (100:51)

But, yeah, he proves his whole thesis, right. For people's reaction to be like, he's the more handsome one, it's like lionizing looks.

Chris Williamson (100:58)

I thought we weren't judging people based on looks. I thought that looks maxing was stupid and it didn't really matter.

William Costello (101:02)

Exactly. Right.

Freya (101:03)

So, yeah, but isn't he more handsome because his demeanor, he's playful and he's smirking. I feel like clavicular just looks so tense and neurotic.

Chris Williamson (101:11)

Almost called autism. Yeah.

William Costello (101:13)

I think Clavicular does those things on purpose, like stages the walk out for attention.

Chris Williamson (101:17)

Yeah, yeah, of course he does.

William Costello (101:19)

But, yeah, it is that effortlessness I do think is more attractive to women.

Chris Williamson (101:23)

Well, the same thing is true to men as well. Think about the difference between Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter.

William Costello (101:30)

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson (101:30)

Sabrina Carpenter is a female designed for the female gaze, and Sydney Sweeney is a female designed for the male gaze.

William Costello (101:38)

Our gay male gaze. Yes.

Chris Williamson (101:39)

Correct.

William Costello (101:40)

Bingo.

Chris Williamson (101:40)

And, yeah, it's. Why is it that men love Sydney Sweeney and hate Sabrina Carpenter? And why is it that women love Sabrina Carpenter and hate Sydney Sweeney?

William Costello (101:48)

There is research to show women hate women with big breasts as well. So they're really.

Chris Williamson (101:54)

Well, if you see very small, very dull, very big eyes, very like, you know, small body, big head, like

William Costello (102:02)

Sabrina does exactly what you've described, Daniel. The. For the girls. Whereas, you know, Sydney Sweeney is very

Chris Williamson (102:08)

much for the guys.

William Costello (102:09)

Even says it in her Instagram Post and things.

Tanya (102:11)

So, yeah, I know. Signaling all the wrong women's fashion is like that, where it's like. It's almost like you could tell immediately who someone is signaling to because women's will be, like, the baggiest thing you could possibly find. And that's the trendy look. And. And it's like, not revealing their body at all. I'm sure men hate it.

William Costello (102:30)

Yeah.

Chris Williamson (102:31)

Alex Cooper on Call of Daddy. They're always in big hoodies. They're always sort of quite slouchy, very cozy.

Freya (102:37)

I do think the pick me insult is really sort of drilled into women of my generation, where it's like, it's not even if you're saying something that men would approve of or looking away that men would approve of, but anything, like, masculine coded. Like, even me just saying I'm interested in masculine podcasts rather than feminine podcasts. That's like a pick me statement. And so I feel like it changes. Is not only how women present themselves, but their mannerisms and their actual temperament and personality becomes shaped towards what women expect of them. Because they don't want to be a pick me.

William Costello (103:08)

Yeah. It's such a clever form of intersexual competition to be, like, don't be seen to be trying to appeal to men.

Tanya (103:15)

I stay the same as, like, a cuck. Like, men are doing it too.

William Costello (103:19)

Simp shaming.

Tanya (103:19)

Yeah.

Chris Williamson (103:20)

Women slut shame, and men simp shame

Tanya (103:23)

anyone who appeals to direct. That's cheating, dude.

Chris Williamson (103:26)

The game theory of slut shaming fucking blows my mind. I learned this in Mate by Jeffrey and Tucker. And basically what slut shaming does is it's a price enforcement mechanism to ensure that the price of sex doesn't drop below a level that most women would be happy with. So if William's prepared to give out blowjobs on the second date, but I want to wait until the fifth date,

William Costello (103:47)

I have to lower confidence.

Chris Williamson (103:49)

I know. I'm sorry. That means that I need to lower my price. So it's in my interests to raise that up, especially given I would be able to undercut it if I make everybody else wait longer to put out, and then I can come in as, like, the bargain discount. That seems like a good deal. But what is it that's happening? It's women giving away what is seen by other women as one of their most valuable resources for negotiating with men. Sex giving it away too freely. So I started thinking about, okay, what's the equivalent for men? What do men give away? And I think it's resources. So, yeah, Women are prepared to give away sex without commitment and that gets castigated by other women. Men who are prepared to give away resources without sex get castigated by other men. That's why men don't like onlyfans women, because they are extracting from the male dating pool the thing that if they weren't able to do it through onlyfans, they might have to go on a date, maybe with me. And that would mean that I would be in with a shark.

Freya (104:50)

This is why I get attacked both ways, because I'll get called an internal misogynist and then men will come to my defense and then they'll get called simps in my comments.

William Costello (105:00)

Exactly right. That's both things in action. Yeah. 100%.

Chris Williamson (105:03)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, I fucking love you all. You're all brilliant. What have you got coming out? You've got a book.

Freya (105:09)

Yes, just a book called Girls and my substack. Freyaindia.co.uk.

Chris Williamson (105:13)

tanya, what have you got to push anything?

Tanya (105:15)

A new paper called the Greater Female Vulnerability Hypothesis. It's still getting published, so not yet out.

Chris Williamson (105:22)

Okay.

William Costello (105:23)

My blue sky. Just follow me on X. You'll see lots of fire poles and some exciting stuff coming out. Follow me on Google Scholar to see the academic stuff. Unreal.

Chris Williamson (105:34)

Guys, I appreciate you all. We've christened Evolutionary Psychology Roundtable. Getting in loads of trouble in the new studio. I appreciate you all. All right, goodbye everybody.

Tanya (105:42)

This was fun.

Chris Williamson (105:44)

Yeah. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode. Another one that I know you'll love. It's just here I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever, ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found. And there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx. Com Books. That's ChrisWillX.Com Books.