Based Camp： The (s＊x) Slave Race Hypothesis
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
189.48932
Summary
Diana Fleischman is a reformed academic and evolutionary psychologist. She is the author of the upcoming book, "How to Drain Your Boyfriend," and she's written a ton of other fascinating stuff that you must go down that rabbit hole. Trust us, you'll be very entertained.
Transcript
00:00:00.980
Hi, everyone. I am super excited. We're going to be speaking with one of our favorite people
00:00:06.180
today, Diana Fleischman, who, in addition to being a reformed academic and evolutionary
00:00:10.460
psychologist, is the author of the not yet published but upcoming book called How to
00:00:14.920
Drain Your Boyfriend. And she's written a ton of other fascinating stuff that you must
00:00:18.860
go down that rabbit hole. Trust us, you'll be very, very entertained. We're going to
00:00:23.540
speak with Diana about a wide range of things. We also want her to...
00:00:26.940
The Apariria Podcast. Yes, host of The Apariria Podcast.
00:00:31.580
Yes. And we honestly want her to start by stress testing one of our weird theories. But we also
00:00:39.120
want to hear all sorts of other things from her. So Diana, welcome, first and foremost.
00:00:46.640
So the theory I really want to go over with you is one from our book, The Pragmatist Guide
00:00:51.180
to Sexuality, which is that we are a slave race. And I'll explain what I mean by this.
00:00:59.060
Specifically, the majority of the evolutionary pressure put on human-to-human social interactions
00:01:04.980
was put on humans who were low within local status hierarchies. First, most humans historically
00:01:12.340
were basically near the bottom of a social status hierarchy. Very few humans were near the top
00:01:17.960
of the social status hierarchy. And while men in that position definitely had more surviving
00:01:22.500
offspring, even when they were in that position, there was less pressure on them to behave in
00:01:30.700
certain ways. Like a leader who failed isn't going to get his genes erased as quickly as a servant or
00:01:37.240
slave who fails. Which means that the average human mind is much more optimized around servitude.
00:01:45.440
And this has a few interesting takeaways. One, Ayla, a mutual friend of both of ours,
00:01:50.800
this would explain why even in men, around 40% prefer to take on submissive positions in sexuality.
00:01:56.760
But it also may explain the way we relate to things like deity or society writ large,
00:02:03.040
how like a president will say, well, I'm the servant of the people. Even though the president
00:02:07.280
is technically the highest level position in society. Or the head of a company might say,
00:02:10.840
well, I'm the servant of the board. We really have few concepts of non-servitude in our society.
00:02:17.080
So I want to get your take on this as an evolutionary psychologist.
00:02:20.700
So one idea that's very interesting is potentially hunter-gatherer societies were less hierarchical
00:02:28.340
than current societies that have very large hierarchies. I've been reading a lot about male and female
00:02:34.120
dynamics. So men tend to be more forgiving of their friends. And they also have more stable status
00:02:39.500
hierarchies than women do because their status hierarchies are based on more stable characteristics
00:02:45.320
such as strength and prestige over time. So it does make sense for men to, and I was listening
00:02:53.260
to an interesting conversation with Beau Weingart and Jonathan Pallison about why would a man gain
00:02:59.100
status by carving beautiful sculptures of a man from history who's high in status, these kinds of
00:03:05.100
ideas. So it's possible. I do see what you're saying that, yeah, the average man is actually
00:03:10.780
subservient. The average man is monogamous or worse. What I'll riff on this with is what I think is even
00:03:17.600
more interesting. I have an idea is I was talking to Louise Perry and we were talking about like how
00:03:22.840
evolutionarily novel is prostitution. And she said that it was unlikely for women to have been passed
00:03:31.420
around and have sex with multiple men, but it was probably very common in evolutionary history,
00:03:36.100
ancestral history for women to be sex slaves to a specific person. Right. And so she talks about
00:03:42.840
kind of Stockholm syndrome and women being uniquely impressed upon by Stockholm syndrome because it is
00:03:49.100
the adaptive thing to do, not just, you know, because of patrilocality. So women would have been taken away
00:03:54.420
on average from their families and given to a strange man's family for her to adapt to his culture and
00:04:00.280
his language and to his customs would have made sense. But the only way you and your kids are
00:04:05.440
going to survive, if you're taken over by a hostile group is through a kind of pleasant submissiveness,
00:04:15.220
I'll say. Accommodation. Yeah. So there's a few riffs I want to take on the, on the thing you've said
00:04:21.180
here. One thing that was really interesting is male status hierarchies being more static than female
00:04:25.560
status hierarchies. To add to that one study that's really interesting is males sort themselves
00:04:29.900
into status hierarchies much faster than women do because the majority of the way that men sort
00:04:34.600
themselves into status hierarchies is by immediate physical traits like height that they can determine
00:04:39.560
the moment they walk into the room. And the reason for that is because the top man historically was
00:04:44.300
typically the man that could beat up the other men. And that's something that you can quickly observe,
00:04:49.060
which would be partially why the male status hierarchy would be more static. Another thing that you
00:04:54.560
mentioned was wars of conquest and taking women. One really interesting study here that I, we talk
00:05:00.400
about in our sexuality book shows that when you have a competition, like a game or, or something like
00:05:06.600
that, that's, I think it's like violent adjacent games, you know, like physical, physical games,
00:05:10.600
and it looks like your side is losing. Males bond more, like they feel closer bonds with the people on
00:05:18.660
their team. Whereas women begin to bond less with the people on their team when it looks like their
00:05:24.320
team is losing, which shows sort of the behavior you're talking about, where it would have really
00:05:29.880
been evolutionarily advantageous if we assume that all the males in a tribe were killed when the tribe
00:05:34.940
was taken over. The final part I want to riff on, sorry if I'm riffing on too many things here,
00:05:39.500
and you just taking notes while you're talking, some really cool ideas, is one of our theories on
00:05:44.040
sexuality, we call the polymorphic human female. So for users, you're familiar with polymorphism,
00:05:49.840
but for users, what it is, is when you have a single genetic code that can be expressed in two
00:05:55.180
behavioral and, and physical phenotypes. So a locus is the classic example here, where when they
00:06:00.440
get above certain population numbers, they change their physiology and behavior patterns. You know,
00:06:05.380
normally they're a grasshopper, but if you rub like their hind leg with a Q-tip, they'll transform
00:06:08.940
into a locus. But even when like baboons, you see polymorphic behavior patterns above certain
00:06:12.920
population sizes. So what we would argue here is that human females, the more sexual partners they
00:06:20.420
have, their body naturally adapts to this. And we can see them producing lex, I think it's, you'll
00:06:27.640
correct me on this, oxytocin when they sleep with partners, which is a forced bonding hormone, which
00:06:32.620
would mean that human females' bodies organically adapt to either bond with the one person they sleep
00:06:39.580
with or bond less with everyone they sleep with because they are assumed they're in the society
00:06:44.580
where they're being passed around. You can tell me if that sounds crazy or Simone, you want to riff on that?
00:06:48.540
No, no, I, I, I'm writing something right now called like, you know, playfully, you know,
00:06:54.420
disagreeable sluts versus agreeable prudes. And, and so, yeah, the, I mean, this idea is like hookup
00:07:00.080
culture is really fine if you know how to disagree with the, with the norm, but if you're agreeable
00:07:05.880
and you're naturally more monogamously inclined as, as the average woman is, then hookup culture
00:07:11.120
is going to be a net bad for you. I'd be really interested in this study because I've, I've had
00:07:15.220
this idea for a long time. So there's this idea in sort of Christian culture where they tell young
00:07:21.360
people, you're like a piece of tape. The more times you stick to something else, the less sticky
00:07:27.080
you get. And so I have drafted something, but not published it basically called, I don't want to be
00:07:32.780
sticky. Cause like when I was younger, when I was like 17, I fell in love with a couple of people
00:07:37.920
who were really low mate value just sounds like mercenary, but yeah, low mate value guys. Like
00:07:42.560
the one guy was like a, like a musician that was unsuccessful. Another guy worked at my grocery
00:07:47.560
store. And, and I remember feeling so in love with this one guy who I really had nothing in common
00:07:53.760
with. And I fell in love very easily until I got past, I don't know, like 10 sexual partners.
00:08:00.300
Hmm. Yeah. We, we, we, we cite, this is actually probably being a good thing for most women.
00:08:07.040
You don't want to illogically fall in love with everyone you sleep with. So you're probably in a
00:08:11.780
lot stronger position. So I, I really liked that. Another thing you mentioned, I want to pull on,
00:08:16.240
it's a concept of bratty sluts, uh, not bratty sluts, but bratty subs, sorry. So in the kink community,
00:08:22.840
there are different ways you can be submissive. And one of these is called the brat.
00:08:26.640
And what I think is going on there. And it's very interesting is what is arousing. The woman is
00:08:33.380
the man exerting his dominance over her. So the bratty behavior elicits the, the dominance display
00:08:42.000
over and over again in the male that allows her to maximally masturbate that aspect of her sexuality.
00:08:49.100
Yeah. There's the, the resistance is screening idea, right? So like female elephant, a male will try
00:08:54.620
to mount her and she'll walk backwards, like a hundred meters or something. He gets to mate,
00:09:00.860
right? And there's other species where I think it is an orcas or some other whale where the male
00:09:06.600
drags the female to shallower water. And so there is an, an, in courtship, there's an element of
00:09:12.740
coercive behavior. And so the bratty sub is definitely like a, a test both psychologically and physically
00:09:19.920
of the dominance of the male. I think this is why women like to be tied up is because
00:09:24.020
it's a perfect, it's a, it's a facsimile of being with somebody who's so large and strong
00:09:30.200
and coordinated that they can hold all your limbs immobile. Right.
00:09:33.780
Oh, that's interesting. I thought it was a swaddling instinct.
00:09:35.800
Yeah. Yeah. So we argue something different about tie-ups, which is one of our spicier takes
00:09:39.700
is that when people are masturbating instincts, that any sort of an instinct, anything that makes
00:09:45.700
them happy, they often misattribute it to sexuality, even when it's not necessarily a
00:09:50.700
sexual instinct, because that's, that's just how we deal with these feelings, like a massage
00:09:55.340
or something like that. Right. And so what we argue might be going on with bondage is, it
00:10:01.100
might actually be a swaddling instinct that hasn't fully turned off from infants. And that specifically
00:10:08.060
when you look at like cling wrap fetishes and stuff like that, you know, where they like
00:10:11.800
vacuum feds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think even, even like rope bondage, but here's where
00:10:17.300
it gets really complicated. Right. Because like, there is definitely a dominance element
00:10:20.900
in there. And we are pretty sure that like, while the dominance submission thing is a really
00:10:26.620
big element of what turns people on and off, it's also like, you know, you can, you can show
00:10:32.020
domination through tying someone up. So like, it can both be like comforting from a swaddling
00:10:36.960
standpoint, but also super big turn on because it is a show of that dominance or it is a show
00:10:41.040
of that power. It's very, it's a, it takes a lot of skill to do it. I see what you're
00:10:44.820
saying. I, I, for me, the swaddling instinct thing, yes, there is a relaxing component to
00:10:49.780
being tied up. I used to live with this guy who was like really into BDSM and he would
00:10:53.460
try out his new gear on me because I was the smallest person he knew. So I remember he put
00:10:57.740
me in a straight jacket one time during a party and it was very relaxing because I didn't
00:11:02.680
feel like there was anything I, people could come over and talk to me or not. It was like one
00:11:06.540
of the most relaxing social situations I've ever been in. Right. Honestly, that sounds amazing.
00:11:10.600
You wouldn't imagine that. Right. Whereas I think if you're, I guess you could make the
00:11:15.660
case that for a woman, if you tie her up, the swaddling instinct relaxes her. And for
00:11:20.980
a woman has to be relaxed before she gets aroused to some extent, I mean, there's something like
00:11:24.920
that. Although the studies that I did back when I was in graduate school on human sexuality
00:11:29.760
is actually, if you show a woman like a horror film or, or thriller, like a man chasing a woman
00:11:36.360
down a dark alleyway, she gets sexually aroused faster after seeing something like that. Then
00:11:42.220
she does just in a, in a neutral, relaxed state. Well, doesn't that suggest though that like
00:11:46.820
she's, that maybe there's some kind of like evolved coping mechanism of like, these are
00:11:52.520
signals that I'm about to get raped. Like let's not cause physical damage, please.
00:11:56.940
That's the, all of the explanations of really repugnant explanations for why do women show
00:12:02.880
enhanced blood flow and even lubrication in the presence of watching pornography, no matter
00:12:08.200
what it is, you can watch two bonobos having sex and a woman in blood flow increase is that
00:12:13.340
it's, what do they call that? Like the damage reduction hypothesis, which is really nasty.
00:12:18.280
But yeah, the idea is that you're seeing anything sexual going on. It's important to get your
00:12:22.140
revolve already for what, whatever might happen. Yeah. For the bonking. Yeah. Devendra Singh,
00:12:27.680
my evolutionary psychology mentor, when I was in graduate school, who died shortly after,
00:12:32.860
he said, he made some joke about like, you know, the best form of foreplay is to chase her around
00:12:36.960
the table or something. I love that. Oh my God. Well, here's a fun take that you might like that we
00:12:42.880
had on, on, on these sorts of topics, which is what's actually going on with the arousal ties to
00:12:49.760
dominance and submission systems. And this we argue is really more of a case of just evolution,
00:12:54.860
being a cheap programmer and reusing a code base that already had. So specifically in mammals,
00:13:01.340
when you have social hierarchies, a very common thing is that mammals will display sexually to
00:13:09.180
show their position was in that dominance hierarchy. And what's really fascinating here is in like
00:13:13.500
spotted hyenas where the females are the dominant animal and females have pseudopenises and
00:13:19.600
spotted hyenas. An erection will be a sign of submission instead of like showing yourself to
00:13:24.540
get mounted. And so what's really interesting here is what we argue is probably going on
00:13:28.920
is that humans needed to show their position within their social hierarchy and the system they already
00:13:34.780
had on hand was their arousal system. So biology just like copied the code from that system to instigate
00:13:42.300
dominance and submission behavior and pre-code that behavior. And that's why it causes arousal.
00:13:47.180
People not always are necessarily because of these more rape hypotheses. What are your thoughts on
00:13:52.860
that? Well, so there's a lot of species in which males show submission to each other by bending over
00:13:59.460
or even being the receptive animal in an anal sex kind of interaction. That to me, I wrote a
00:14:05.640
behaviorist account of that once, which is that what's it called? I can't remember the behaviorist term,
00:14:11.900
but there are, you know, like, let's say there's two behaviors. Let's say you have a dog that beats up on
00:14:15.580
your other dog. So the dog can either play with a toy across the room or it can beat up on the other
00:14:20.040
dog. Those behaviors are like mutually exclusive and like a more dominant animal beating you up or
00:14:25.620
having sex with you. Those are mutually exclusive. So what you're incidentally doing, if you bend over
00:14:30.320
and show a submission behavior or let the other animal mount you is you're rewarding, not beating me
00:14:35.180
up. Oh, that's a really interesting take. I like that. So that's one interesting thing. But, but also,
00:14:43.180
yeah, in terms of dominance, yes, it's, it's always better. If you look at all these different animals,
00:14:49.820
there's a very interesting paper cooperation and they expand the notion of cooperation past what we
00:14:55.680
would normally think. And they also say, let's say two bucks are sizing each other up and they look at
00:15:00.660
each other's like antler size and one decides to forfeit because the other one has bigger antlers,
00:15:06.320
but an actual physical altercation is costly for both of them. So actually that is a form of
00:15:11.980
cooperation, even though their interests are actually not, well, their interests are aligned
00:15:15.960
and that they both don't, they don't want to fight unless it's really necessary to figure out who's,
00:15:20.660
who's dominant. So you could also see that in terms of sexuality, like physical altercation is,
00:15:25.480
is very costly. And so a sexual altercation is, is generally always preferable.
00:15:29.940
If you want to show that you're submissive. And it also has, as I said, the added benefit of
00:15:34.720
rewarding the dominant animal for not beating you up. Yeah. So just, just a quick note here for,
00:15:39.560
for listeners and quick biology lesson, what she described there is called honest signaling.
00:15:43.760
And it's a useful concept in biology that can also be applied to other areas of your life,
00:15:48.140
which are types of signals that you can show people that cannot be easily faked. So like if you
00:15:53.220
were signaling wells, something like jewelry, which can be rented is a very easy thing to fake.
00:15:58.540
While something like a house is a very hard thing to fake and a much more honest signal of wealth.
00:16:03.320
But Simone, you haven't talked much. What are your thoughts on all this?
00:16:06.280
Sorry. I thought you were about to be like, and this is why you should offer sex to your boss at
00:16:10.460
the office so that you can get promoted and make sure that you're not trying to supplant them.
00:16:15.580
This is, this is moissanite. So this is my, my pregnancy ring because it's,
00:16:21.120
I don't fit into, yeah, I'm too swollen to wear my normal one. And this is like a $300 ring or
00:16:25.320
something like that, but a diamond this size, cause they're indistinguishable to like the naked eye
00:16:29.220
or whatever, or even to many jewelers would be, I don't know, 10 grand. So yeah, I love,
00:16:34.360
I love fake, fake fitness when it comes to jewelry.
00:16:37.780
Right. Also moissanite is more sparkly. So like, I almost feel like it's more effective
00:16:41.740
signaling. It's, it's, it's gorgeous. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, what I'm really curious about is,
00:16:47.820
you know, there is this, this surprising, and this shows up in ALS data. It shows up in the data that
00:16:53.040
we did abundance of people who are submissive, not just women, which of course, like the majority
00:16:57.780
of women are, are submissive, but also men. Well, what, what are other compelling reasons for
00:17:03.380
there being so many submissive men? But bottom, bottom's also at number tops. I remember Mike
00:17:09.240
Bailey having a drink with him several years ago. And he was saying that gay men joke that like,
00:17:13.480
you go out to a gay bar, which gay bars are not as common as they used to be. It's like a hundred
00:17:17.980
bottoms for every one top. No. Yeah. So bottoms are way more common. I don't know about like
00:17:24.340
versatils or switches. I mean, there's a variety of other reasons that could be the case though. Cause
00:17:29.680
like females are the default sex. If homosexuality is the result of some kind of
00:17:34.820
difficulty, let's say in the, the programming for masculinity, then you would expect that,
00:17:40.380
you know, it's, yeah. Or like female receptive behavior is much easier to code because it just
00:17:47.960
involves kind of like bending over than, than copulation or topping, which is much more complicated
00:17:53.380
and involves a lot more motivation. Right. Well, it's also fairly risky. So you have a female
00:17:58.580
mimicry, which you see in a lot of species. And that could be what we're seeing here.
00:18:02.800
Oh, you mean like sneaky copulation? Yeah. Sneaky copulation. Yeah.
00:18:09.780
We can, we can curse. It's called sneaky fuckers.
00:18:13.720
Yes. So essentially what happens in, in some animals for listeners and this may or may not have
00:18:22.380
relevance to the world today. So some males, especially in highly gender dimorphic species. So
00:18:28.400
like, you'll see this in like some crabs or like some males are like three times the size of other
00:18:31.980
crabs. Occasionally males will be born the size of a female crab and the big males don't notice them
00:18:37.600
and they will enter these other crab communities sneakily. In other species, you will see males adopt
00:18:44.680
female behavior or even take on gay roles to enter sort of the trust circle of other males and then
00:18:53.740
sleep with the women in that animal's harem. I guess you could call it.
00:18:58.160
Yeah. The sunfish has got three morphs, which is the, the regular male that has the territory that
00:19:03.560
guards his territory, a tiny little male that sneaks in. And then the male that looks just like a female
00:19:12.320
And this is, so we had a podcast where we argued that the, the red pill in a way, in the way they're
00:19:16.980
approaching women creates thoughts. I actually, THOTs, I actually believe that in the same way,
00:19:23.060
the extremist feminist community, one of the reasons why whenever you do surveys in that
00:19:27.800
community, you see such high rates of rape is they are essentially bringing in these female
00:19:34.200
mimicry guys who are going to pretend to have this like ultra white knight-y perspective on the world.
00:19:40.740
But in, in animal kingdoms, those are the, the types of males that are most likely to rape or one
00:19:47.980
Of course, males. Yeah. I mean, I did a deep, I did, I did work on this 10 years ago on bisexuality
00:19:54.740
and about evolutionary explanations for homosexuality. And I taught human sexuality. I remember a deep dive
00:20:01.520
on this in a lecture and chapter that I read in my twenties. And this guy was talking about how gay men
00:20:08.320
have, you know, very reduced rates of reproduction, obviously compared to straight men. And then it
00:20:14.280
doesn't actually seem like this kind of sneaky fucker strategy. Maybe you're talking about
00:20:19.080
something different, but it doesn't actually. No, no, no. I'm not talking about gay men. I'm
00:20:21.520
actually specifically talking about white knight-y guys. So these are guys. Oh, okay. Feminist guys, yeah.
00:20:26.280
An extremist, like feminist perspective, you could say that like no rational guy looking at the world
00:20:31.500
today would adopt to get into these, I guess people would call them like hardcore SJW spaces.
00:20:36.520
But it is related. Basically, they're creating an incentive to create sneaky fuckers, essentially.
00:20:43.200
Well, I mean, it's a copulation strategy that is, that is premised upon dishonesty. Yeah. I mean,
00:20:48.620
that's how they're getting into these communities by being dishonest about their lived experiences,
00:20:52.440
because that's what you need to be as a guy often to enter these communities.
00:20:56.380
Well, that's, that's what I'm saying is the communities create that requirement. Like you have
00:21:00.380
to be sneaky to get in. So it creates people who are being.
00:21:03.180
So we'll see. Yeah. I mean, I guess you could also say that these communities, like the,
00:21:07.640
there's a very advantageous sex ratio and there's a variety of good, good reasons to try to get,
00:21:13.160
get into them. Yeah. I'm pretty agnostic about that given that I'm not in those communities myself.
00:21:18.580
Yeah. I have loved this episode and I would love to do another episode with you if you are open to
00:21:25.920
that. Yeah, for sure. Yay. Okay. Then we are going to record it right now. Yeah. We're going to record