In this episode, we talk about fetishes and paraphilias, and how they tell us a lot about human neurology, evolutionary conditions, and the way humans think more broadly. We also talk about some of the weirdest things people like farting and farting.
00:00:06.760They're like, why are you interested in obscure paraphilias, which are more commonly known in the public as fetishes?
00:00:14.160And the answer is because it tells us a lot about human neurology, human evolutionary conditions, and the way humans think more broadly.
00:00:25.880And people might be like, wait, wait, what do you mean by that, right?
00:00:30.980So if you see an impulse that exists across a broad breadth of the human population, but doesn't appear like it would have been selected for in an evolutionary context, like it wouldn't have increased the number of surviving offspring they had, you have found one of two things.
00:00:54.540Either you have shown that you misunderstand the environmental context that humanity evolved in, and that something that seems like it would have been a maladaptive behavior was actually a positive behavior, which is very interesting if you find that.
00:01:12.280But then the other thing that you may have found is you have found a way that the brain essentially breaks or a pathway doesn't work correctly, but doesn't work correctly in a way that happens over and over and over again in different humans.
00:01:28.980Which tells you something about like, if trains keep flying onto a road at a certain point, you can tell broadly at least in one area where a train track is likely supposed to be, and like the speed of trains on that train tracks and where trains are turning on that train track.
00:01:47.920Now, this becomes especially interesting in the world of fetishes and paraphilias, because this is a very common area where you see something that is very clearly a hard-coded biological instinct in individuals cross-culturally.
00:02:07.120People will say, oh no, well this is all like modern internet stuff that's causing this, and we'll get into that argument in a second.
00:02:13.420Well, I can get into it right now. It's just very obviously not. If you look in a historic context, most of the paraphilias you see today, like sadism and stuff like that, you're going to see in like the Marquis de Sade, for example, which was definitely in a pre-internet context.
00:02:29.240Or you see in the British vice, which was a so common fetish among British people, they called it the British vice, which was men who liked being spanked by paddles by women.
00:02:39.720Here is James Joyce writing about farts.
00:02:42.740Big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks, and a lot of tiny little naughty farties, ending in a large gush from your hole.
00:02:51.820I think I could pick hers out in a room full of farting women.
00:02:55.320It is a rather girlish noise, not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have.
00:03:01.340It is sudden and dry and dirty, like a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night.
00:03:07.520I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.
00:03:15.640So people will be like, oh, weird stuff like farting porn.
00:03:19.260That's like from weird Brazilian farting.
00:03:21.480No, this was around in the time of James Joyce.
00:03:24.280So if you see a fetish today that is common, you will almost always see it in a historic context.
00:03:31.080And today we are going to discuss the concept of monster girls.
00:03:37.200Because monster girls and monster boys are something that you see pretty frequently in pornography and hentai.
00:03:45.940However, it is also something that like doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary context.
00:03:52.620Why would you be attracted to something that's not human and a person can go, oh, come on, this doesn't appear in historic stuff.
00:04:00.300And I'm like, are you not familiar with your Greek myth?
00:09:11.020So, you actually do find a cross-correlation here.
00:09:13.320And we didn't just find this cross-correlation in our data.
00:09:15.660When Ayla ran the stats with a completely different data pool, she also found this cross-correlation here.
00:09:24.420So, this verifies this hypothesis, that there is something where some humans have a looser bound on the human form when they find it attractive.
00:09:35.500So, let's talk about how this could work and how we can verify if this is the way that it's working.
00:09:41.140So, super-stimuli are a very important concept when you are studying sexuality, okay?
00:09:46.600So, a super-stimuli is like if you have a bird that evolved to sit on blue eggs, but there were never like giant blue rocks around its evolutionary environment.
00:09:57.140It never had a pressure to not sit on something that was larger than its normal blue eggs or bluer than its normal blue eggs.
00:10:04.260And so, if you put a giant blue rock next to it, it will always choose the rock over its own eggs.
00:10:08.880This is just a very common thing you see throughout evolutionary biology.
00:10:13.440And it makes sense as to why this would be a thing.
00:10:22.500So, with human sexual drives, well, males and females are both, to an extent, attracted to the average.
00:10:29.700Like, if you were going to, like, pre-code them to breed with a thing that is likely to lead to offspring, you would pre-code them with, look for the things that gender differentiate males and females, and then target individuals who appear to have these traits.
00:10:44.600These would be secondary sex characteristics.
00:10:47.080So, with women, these would be breasts, butt, hips.
00:10:50.280With men, this would be height, you know, male stature, muscle mass, yeah, et cetera.
00:10:57.460So, and you do, and a deep voice, and you do see an attraction to these traits.
00:11:02.580But what is more interesting is we didn't have super stimuli of these traits in our evolutionary environment.
00:11:11.900We did not have women with supernormally large breasts in our evolutionary environment.
00:11:17.660Well, I mean, unless they were, you know, some genetic abnormalities.
00:11:21.840It's eased in some way or something like that, right.
00:11:24.000But what I'm saying is it just didn't appear that much.
00:11:26.080There was not an evolutionary reason for anyone within the population to evolve disgust to that trait.
00:11:36.280Even though I, and most men, actually do reflexively feel disgust when they see a woman who looks non-human for her gender dimorphic anatomy.
00:11:48.400Even something as, as I think some people would consider as small as, like, Caitlyn, or what's her name?
00:11:54.320The Caitlyn Jenner's family member who has a giant butt?
00:12:10.960Because you go to Miami, you see giant asses and women wearing ass-padding underwear to try to create the result of that.
00:12:16.980No, this culture affects what you find attractive much less than you would think.
00:12:20.520Well, then why is there so much difference between the body type that you see pervasive among higher status women or, we'll say, image-conscious women in Miami versus Los Angeles versus New York?
00:12:30.640This appears to be an evolutionary thing.
00:12:32.560Well, okay, so I guess I can get into this because we do go into this in our books.
00:12:36.280The core thing that differentiates, so with men, you're going to be attracted to, there's sort of two ideal feminine traits that you could be attracted to.
00:13:29.960We have a video where we go over this in more detail, but it's like 10-fold or 20-fold increase in liking this, you know, flat justice body type for wealthy men versus the poorest groups have been.
00:13:42.560But you also see this just, I mean, if you're looking, like, you don't see people like, you know, Elon or Bill Gates or something like that dating these women who look like super, super, super feminine.
00:13:56.480Instead, the women that you see them dating is, are often very wealthy.
00:14:01.840More androgynous looking because they look so young.
00:14:04.540Whereas when you see wealthy men date these women, they are wealthy men who appear to have an extreme level of status anxiety, which shows that, like, biologically, they don't see themselves as wealthy.
00:14:15.240Trump would be a good example of this.
00:14:16.720If you look at the way that he accessorizes in the lifestyle he lives in when he's been to Mar-a-Lago or something like that, there is clearly a fairly large level of status anxiety there, which is likely driving his reproductive choices that make his reproductive choices much more similar to a lower economic status.
00:14:34.620Which ultimately made him a man of the people.
00:14:36.640He's a poor man's idea of a rich man, even in his own mind, because of that anxiety.
00:15:21.720So humans appear to have a secondary system that overlaps their attraction system that's meant to prevent them from having sex with non-human things that are non-efficacious in terms of sex with them, could lead to diseases, and blah, blah, blah, right?
00:15:41.900So how do they determine non-human things?
00:15:44.260It's likely that there is a level of innate disgust that your average programmed human has to things that look sufficiently different from the average human form.
00:15:57.580And this is why your average human has a level of disgust to things like bestiality, to things like, you know, extreme breast size and stuff like that.
00:16:09.980However, you could call it deformity, deformity.
00:16:15.360Well, it appears that certain ways of altering a body do not count or do not trigger this instinct in a large portion of the population.
00:16:27.880So first, let's talk about the huge chunk of the population, which is a fairly big chunk, that does not appear to have this disgust reaction.
00:16:49.060So if you have 100 women, seven of them will have consumed erotic material that consume this, that portray this.
00:16:56.120So, what's going on in these individuals?
00:16:58.920Well, if you have any of these systems, in the same way that our predominant arousal system sometimes breaks, right?
00:17:04.800Like, sometimes men are predominantly aroused by male characteristics in their partners, i.e., gay people.
00:17:11.540Sometimes women are aroused by female characteristics in their partners.
00:17:15.120Like, clearly, evolution wasn't strongly sorting for this.
00:17:18.560You know, you're just getting a broken system.
00:17:20.740Sometimes individuals, you know, you see it get turned on by feces, right?
00:17:25.320Like, this is clearly something that's meant to create, in an evolutionary context, a disgust reaction.
00:17:31.360So what it means is there's two ways this disgust system can break.
00:17:34.820One is it just doesn't activate at all.
00:17:39.060These are the individuals who I think are mostly in generally large but not monstrously large breasts or generally large, like, the two-fit penis and stuff like that, right?
00:17:49.440Like, these are individuals who are interested in something that is outside the normal bounds but isn't, like, specifically stimulating the system.
00:17:56.220Then there's another thing that appears to happen in arousal patterns, which is that arousal and disgust get flipped because we argue in great detail in our book that arousal and disgust are actually the same system.
00:18:09.520When you are aroused by something, your eyes dilate, you breathe in, you look at it longer, you want to get closer to it.
00:18:15.340When you are disgusted by something, your pupils contrast, you hold your nose or you hold your breath to not smell, and you instinctively look away and try to get away from the thing.
00:18:25.160It's just the same system with a negative modifier.
00:18:28.200And anything that causes an innate disgust within some portion of the population will be a fetish for some other percent of the population.
00:18:35.620And people are like, well, everything's a fetish.
00:18:40.580If you take things that don't cause disgust but are tied to other innate human impulses, like a fear of heights or a fear of fire, for example,
00:18:49.500there is not a community or at least a large community consummate with the, you know, insects or poo or farts tied to something like fire arousal or falling from high locations arousal.
00:19:04.480So it's not just like all of your systems can break in this way.
00:19:09.140And it's the same with arousal patterns.
00:19:10.720Anything that can arouse a population is going to disgust a subset of that population.
00:19:15.900Well, you can also get an inverse system where the thing that's supposed to identify things that look inhuman ends up accidentally arousing a small portion of the population instead of disgusting them.
00:19:28.020And this is what I think leads to full-on bestiality and stuff like that.
00:19:31.320But then there's a second category here, which I would call like the cat girl phenomenon.
00:19:36.500A cat girl, a monster girl in this world?
00:20:25.020Another thing that doesn't appear to trigger it is small cosmetic modifications such as tail, ear differences.
00:20:35.000Those sorts of things don't seem to broadly trigger this.
00:20:38.240A great example here would be elf ears slash Vulcan ears on girls.
00:20:42.900I have seen so many guys thirst after elf slash Vulcan girls.
00:20:47.440And then another one that's really interesting if you're going to stretch is broadly if you're dealing with a biped with breasts or a T-shaped male figure like human, female, male, human secondary sex characteristics for either males or females.
00:21:03.760For a large but smaller portion of the population, this also doesn't seem to trigger this monster girl.
00:21:43.320Because we can actually see the genetic results of this arousal pattern being mainstream within specific populations.
00:21:51.000So if you look at regions of the world where you have a high degree of mate selection, either because there were periods where all the women died pretty frequently, or even more common when all of the men died pretty frequently, but you see this in either area, you begin to get the evolution of monstrous traits.
00:22:14.100Traits that you do not see in default human populations.
00:22:20.040No, because people tend to select for people with extremely novel traits.
00:22:27.760In a society with no cat girls, this shows that the cat girl might be considered uniquely attractive.
00:22:33.880In a society where nobody had like naturally occurring pink eyes or something like that, the one individual with pink eyes or skin or something like that might be considered uniquely attractive.
00:22:44.100And you can say, what are you talking about these monstrous traits that appear almost nowhere in human populations except for areas that underwent very strict genetic selection over a long period of time?
00:22:56.740Well, the reason you don't notice them is the populations that had them have dominated the globe.
00:23:06.400Redheads exist almost nowhere outside of extremely cold regions.
00:23:12.320In fact, not just redheads, any human hair color but black is incredibly rare if you're talking about the broad initial ethno groups that would have existed in the world that would have evolved out of the initial human sample size and you go back a thousand years ago.
00:23:33.600The populations that had non-black hair only lived really in arctic regions.
00:23:41.820Yeah, and the world also is a lot colder to your point.
00:23:44.780Another trait is, and they're like, what are you talking about pink eyes?
00:23:50.320You are forgetting that all eyes other than brown eyes are actually an incredibly rare trait if you go a thousand years ago.
00:23:58.880And only really existed in arctic environments where you had extreme levels of mate selection.
00:24:05.640And then people are like, well, different skin colors.
00:24:08.840Gingers basically have a unique skin tone with their extreme level of freckling.
00:24:15.280This would have been considered if you took one of them and put them in ancient Rome.
00:24:20.400They would not be particularly dissimilar to an ancient Roman than to us a person with pronounced canines would look or a person with cat ears or a person with a tail would look.
00:24:37.220Yeah, a subtle but standing out actually wins the genetic lottery when you are dealing with a really high level of sexual selection, determining which genes win and which genes lose.
00:24:52.860So we do actually have real monster girls among us.
00:26:02.080Giant loop earrings or giant things in their cheeks.
00:26:05.600Now, when I see these women, I actually get the same form of disgust that I would get from looking at an actual monster, like something that is genuinely non-human.
00:26:13.080So I assume that they likely co-evolved with a damped down form of that repulsion selection in their cultural groups.
00:26:21.380Which could mean that if you were to do studies on these populations, you would find much more attractive to things like monster girl type pornography.
00:27:20.520And so this is all that people are like, why does all of this matter from human?
00:27:25.880Well, when you understand things like that what arouses you is based on gated metrics with a discussed in arousal system that are likely the same system, which work was in certain windows.
00:27:36.720One, you can better control your own involuntary arousal pathways by contextualizing them as what they are, random switches in your head at birth.
00:27:49.540When you contextualize them as like weird addictions and stuff like that due to, you know, things you were exposed to on the internet, then you relate to them as an addiction.
00:28:00.620And the thing is, is people rarely win against addictions.
00:28:03.900When you relate to them as just a standard like switch thing that happened at birth, then you can more easily be like, oh yeah, I'm just going to choose to ignore that.
00:28:11.940Like other things I choose to ignore that I, like, for example, when I am around a friend or something like that, and they have a hot wife, like I am pre-evolved to want to sleep with or hit on their wife, but I choose not to hit on them.
00:28:25.720I don't view that as like an addiction or something.
00:28:28.460I'm just like, yeah, I choose not to find that person arousing.
00:28:33.000When you understand these systems and contextualize them for what they really are, it's much easier to not have them influence you.
00:28:42.560And so if you have any paraphilias, which most people have, if people are like, oh, that person has a fetish, how weird.
00:28:50.480I'm like, actually, if you look at the data, if you have no fetishes, you are the weird one that you are in a vast minority.
00:28:56.380I can't remember if it was like 8% of people have like no fetishes at all in our data set.
00:29:00.020Like you are the weirdo if you have no fetish.
00:29:02.980It is not the people with a fetish who are weird.
00:29:05.100Which I just want to clarify, because, you know, anyone looking at Ayla's stats is going to see the vanilla stuff is obviously the most popular.
00:29:11.820You very well are probably going to be aroused by most of the vanilla stuff and then also have these fetishes.
00:29:18.600Yeah, yeah, no specific fetish is weird, but understanding how these work, and we could do other videos.
00:29:25.580And we've done some videos in our early videos if you've only watched our recent podcast, because, you know, we went over some of our theories from our sexuality book and more recent stuff.
00:29:32.540I mean, and some of the early stuff that we did.
00:29:34.720You can get a deeper dive on some of these topics.
00:29:37.260But knowing about this doesn't just help you, but also being able to teach your kids about how human sexuality actually works prevents them from contextualizing things that they don't have control over.
00:29:51.920It's either shameful or worse than that, because if it's shameful, then they hide it, overindulge in it.
00:30:04.860But worse than that, they think it's something they can't talk to their parents about, so they see themselves as discriminated for it, and then they begin to contextualize it as part of their identity.
00:30:14.300The very most dangerous thing is that your kids grow up not understanding how human sexuality works, and then they begin to categorize some paraphilia that they have as a portion of their identity, and then their core identity becomes something like furry or, you know, whatever, right?
00:30:33.260I mean, yeah, they're very high-profile examples of religiously very conservative families having certain members do terrible things, probably because they weren't, yeah, given context, given a way to understand what they felt and what they were tempted to do.
00:31:58.080I mean, we've already ruined sex for our kids, thank goodness, you know, because we talk about it way too openly and they're going to hate that.
00:32:04.440And so they're probably going to be virgins until their mid-20s, but I'm glad...
00:32:09.440I'm glad they're virgins their whole life if they want to be, so long as they have kids that are genetically theirs.
00:32:25.580We are open to sexual investigation, but I would think most people reading our book would say, you know, I say objectively, human sexuality is pretty disgusting.
00:32:41.720If you removed your pre-coded addiction to, like, pre-coded predilection for these behaviors, and you think about them like you think about anything else...
00:32:53.320These are like oozing organs, like, you know...
00:32:56.340But I mean, also when you think about other very basic human functions like eating, and, you know, you think about...
00:33:01.960And you contextualize it in that context, it also helps you understand that, you know, this is just sort of a pre-coded thing into you, but it doesn't define who you are.
00:33:14.660We have a language and we have a means of explaining to people that you may really like this one type of food, but it's not good for you, and that doesn't define you.
00:33:23.940You know, you're not a whatever type of food person, whereas with sexuality, unfortunately, it has been turned into this identity thing, which seems to be even worse now.