Based Camp - The Evolving Science of Why Women Cheat

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today.

00:00:04.140 Today, we are going to discuss the topic of why women cheat. 1.00

00:00:09.920 Ooh la la. Have I done something?

00:00:14.440 No, I was watching a Chris Williamson episode, and he was interviewing a psychologist about this.

00:00:19.760 And the psychologist, honestly, I thought I didn't really agree with his interpretation of this particular question,

00:00:25.180 but it got me thinking about the question from an angle that I hadn't thought about it before.

00:00:30.180 Oh, interesting.

00:00:31.240 Which is not why do specific women cheat. 1.00

00:00:35.080 Okay.

00:00:35.640 But why do women cheat at all, period? 1.00

00:00:39.680 Like, why is it in human beings across cultures, you see cheating as a behavior pattern.

00:00:45.720 Right.

00:00:46.080 Why do you see it cross-culturally in humans?

00:00:48.860 And isn't it pretty high?

00:00:50.260 I feel like Ayla did numbers on this at one point, and I was actually shocked by the proportion of both men and women that cheat.

00:00:56.300 We're going to go into the numbers.

00:00:57.640 We're going to go into the numbers.

00:00:58.440 We're going to go into how they differ by ethnicity.

00:01:00.460 We're going to go into how they differ by culture.

00:01:02.460 We're going to go into, oh, you're going to get so much.

00:01:04.480 But the point I'm making here is not all monogamous animals cheat.

00:01:10.420 So some animals that are mostly monogamous basically almost never cheat.

00:01:15.280 Do swans almost never cheat? 0.97

00:01:17.080 Well, I'll give you some that almost never cheat.

00:01:19.180 Black vultures. 1.00

00:01:20.300 Well, the black vultures. 0.99

00:01:22.740 Of extra parafertilization and black vultures. 0.95

00:01:26.560 Okay.

00:01:27.360 California mice.

00:01:28.760 DNA analysts suggest wild California mice have extremely low rates of extra parafertility.

00:01:34.480 I didn't know there was such a thing as California mice.

00:01:37.700 Eurasian beavers.

00:01:39.100 Okay.

00:01:39.940 Why are these so geographically specific?

00:01:43.200 It's just Californian mice.

00:01:45.120 I'm naming species here.

00:01:46.600 And by species, you're going to get different patterns.

00:01:48.120 Here's an interesting one.

00:01:49.180 This one's not going to be as funny for you because it's not the coyotes.

00:01:52.740 Coyotes have a study of urban coyotes that found 100% monogamy over a six-year period

00:01:58.580 with no evidence of any cheating at all.

00:02:01.120 And they're urban.

00:02:02.040 So you'd expect them to be more polyamorous.

00:02:03.580 They're very urban, right?

00:02:04.600 You'd expect them to be polyamorous by now, right?

00:02:06.620 Yeah, that's bizarre.

00:02:08.180 Macaroni penguins.

00:02:09.660 And Atlantic cousins.

00:02:11.800 Do they have top hats, Howard?

00:02:14.140 What?

00:02:15.660 Are macaroni penguins?

00:02:17.600 Anyway, I need a picture of this.

00:02:18.880 Look at those crazy-looking penguins.

00:02:20.780 They got all the things.

00:02:23.160 Oh, the other ones with the little feather crowns.

00:02:25.860 Yes, yes, yes, yes.

00:02:27.100 Okay, okay.

00:02:29.680 They aren't, so they do wear hats.

00:02:31.240 Would you like to know more?

00:02:32.600 They do wear hats.

00:02:33.760 Okay.

00:02:34.760 So, historically, the most believed hypothesis, and it's the one that we argued for in our book,

00:02:42.140 for the predominant reason women cheat, is to get better genes. 1.00

00:02:47.960 This is the beta, bucks, alpha, F strategy.

00:02:52.840 This is the, I have a provider who I know is going to raise my children, but frankly, I can't secure a high-value male who will invest in me.

00:03:04.320 But most high-value men, at least in a historic context, this is before child support, and we often talk about the genetic effects of child support, not super positive.

00:03:12.300 But before child support was a risk, historically, a man, and we'll get into the stats of how often this happened historically in a bit, would just sleep with other women, right?

00:03:23.340 You know, so I, as a woman, might only be able to get some fairly average-looking, some fairly average-competence man, but in terms of, you know, what I actually want, I want the powerful lords, kids.

00:03:36.680 I want the, or the person who has shown themselves to be, you know, an amazing knight, and who is buff, and who is fit, and everything like that. 0.96

00:03:43.380 But he's never going to settle down with a woman like me, but he, screw me, right? 0.79

00:03:47.120 You know? 0.94

00:03:48.000 Well, it didn't, aren't there some, there was a study at some point that found that women who were ovulating were more attracted to men who looked more chad-like.

00:03:56.120 Yeah, so that becomes a part of this story, is that that study's kind of been debunked.

00:04:00.860 Ooh.

00:04:01.400 And that was a core, seen as a core piece of evidence supporting this.

00:04:05.060 But I want to go to you here, and say, you were telling me earlier about how, like, all of these female romance books, it's always like, they don't talk about the personality, it's just how much power the guy has.

00:04:16.480 Yes.

00:04:16.940 Can you talk about that?

00:04:18.040 Yes, yeah.

00:04:18.840 A really weird thing that I realized after talking with Malcolm about, sort of, a common characteristic I've noticed of women in erotic material is really their sentiment, their enthusiasm, their, their, their, kind of their personality to a great extent is a selling point.

00:04:36.960 Whereas in all of these romance novels, and I've gone through so many, I like reading romance novel reviews more than I like reading romance novels, which is really interesting, and also seeing how they're tagged.

00:04:47.740 And it does not matter if they are good people or bad people.

00:04:52.840 It does not matter if they are kind or mean.

00:04:56.080 What matters is that they are dominant, especially high class, as perceived by society.

00:05:00.800 So that could be that they're a mob boss.

00:05:02.340 It could be that they're a billionaire.

00:05:03.740 It could be that they are a fairy prince.

00:05:05.940 But they are high in the hierarchy, and they have chosen, for whatever reason, the female protagonist, who typically is extremely annoying. 0.96

00:05:14.280 But they have no, there's like no person, there's very little exposition into their personality.

00:05:18.680 There's not really a lot of description of it.

00:05:21.400 Maybe they're a little cold, you know, like the only, the only elements of their personality seem to have to do with their dominance and status.

00:05:28.520 So there's nothing beyond that.

00:05:29.920 There's nothing like, oh, he like is really into knitting or, you know, he, he laughs whenever he sees dogs vomit.

00:05:36.780 I don't know.

00:05:37.320 But like, I don't, I don't know how to describe people's personalities, obviously.

00:05:40.160 But it is interesting that women are actually quite superficial in what arouses them. 1.00

00:05:45.320 And we talk about this in the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, which is, people are like, oh, women are like, not that sexual, and men are really sexual.

00:05:52.600 Like, they look at porn consumption rates in men, and the amount of time.

00:05:56.060 Yeah, but when you look at the romance novel industry, you discover that, oh my gosh, women are very. 1.00

00:06:00.580 Yeah, if you include erotic fan fiction in romance novels, porn consumption among women, women is almost exactly equal. 0.91

00:06:06.860 And they do it publicly, for the love of God.

00:06:08.760 I mean, they talk about it like it's okay, you know.

00:06:11.440 Yeah, well, it's a social thing for them, which is also interesting, right?

00:06:15.320 Like, there isn't the same stigmatization around talking what, you know, they're clearly getting off to.

00:06:20.200 That's, that's what they're doing when they're, you know, Fifty Shades of Grey is not for the story, right?

00:06:25.440 You know, this is a smut.

00:06:28.340 You know, it is, it is a design predominantly to arouse them.

00:06:31.980 I mean, I actually tried to watch, I didn't, I couldn't read it, but I tried to watch Fifty Shades of Grey to, like, comment on it in a podcast for, that we did.

00:06:40.640 I literally couldn't make it through, it was so bad.

00:06:43.620 It was that boring, too.

00:06:44.960 And the characters were that uninspired, that it just, it's, it's really, it's awful.

00:06:51.160 And so, yeah, there is this sort of one note power dynamic thing going on.

00:06:54.440 And so, this one note power dynamic would support two of the potential, well, maybe more than two of the, actually, all of the potential theories.

00:07:01.940 It doesn't actually solve anything for us.

00:07:03.720 Yeah.

00:07:04.140 But, so, so, better genes is one hypothesis.

00:07:07.520 Okay.

00:07:07.780 This was believed a long time in the field as, like, the predominant strategy because one study reported to show that women, depending on their stage of the cycle, when they were more fertile, preferred men who were more, like, masculine and, and, and more of this, like, alphas type.

00:07:26.340 And when they were less fertile, they preferred men who were more resource providers for them and caring and everything like that. 0.77

00:07:32.960 Very much this, this, this, this dynamic.

00:07:35.240 And that would have been created by evolution if that had been a strategy and the mechanism of action of that strategy.

00:07:40.520 The problem is, is when we wrote the Pragmentous Guide to Sexuality, it had, it had, the initial studies debunking it had come out, but, like, they hadn't been accepted as mainstream yet.

00:07:49.120 And it had been, like, the mainstream perspective in the field for so long, I wasn't going to, like, throw it out.

00:07:53.600 Now, the, the, the studies that are, are more robust, they have been replicated, and it appears that that does not happen.

00:08:01.080 Now, I need to note here, that does not mean that women, from an evolutionary perspective, were not engaging in this behavior. 0.64

00:08:10.420 It just means you didn't have this mechanism of action promoting the behavior of the time of cycle in a woman. 1.00

00:08:18.160 So, note there.

00:08:20.200 It also is interesting that you could even argue that hidden fertility in women at all could be a signifier that women were doing this strategy.

00:08:29.500 So, this is actually one of the big mysteries of human sexuality.

00:08:34.080 In most other primates, a woman's period when she's fertile is pretty heavily signaled, like giant red butts or something like that, that they don't have during other periods of their cycle.

00:08:45.920 But in humans, it's covert.

00:08:47.560 You, as a male, are going to struggle to tell if a woman is fertile or not fertile, depending on the way she appears to you.

00:08:54.000 Well, I mean, unless she's on her period, in which case, it is technically possible to get pregnant, but very unlikely, but still.

00:09:01.340 But you kind of know that the odds are extremely low.

00:09:03.840 Yeah, but other primates show, okay?

00:09:05.380 So, this is likely to ensure that the sexual capital of a woman is preserved across all periods of her fertility window, which indicates that some of these strategies may have been at play here, but we'll get to some of the other.

00:09:18.240 The predominant strategy after this one, after the, oh, they're going to cheat strategy, was a strategy that said the predominant reason women cheat is because they are looking for a better partner, i.e. a woman cheats when she thinks she can secure a partner who is better than her last partner.

00:09:39.540 And they use this as like an interstitial period.

00:09:42.560 And this is what I hear most from at least 10 years ago, what I heard most when I hung around red pill communities, that this was hypergamy, and this was why women cheated and left. 0.97

00:09:54.120 Whenever they saw a better option, they just hop onto it.

00:09:57.020 Yeah, potentially. 0.60

00:09:57.760 So, and here I would note some dumb reasons why people say, so some people really hated these two strategies, like some feminists did. 1.00

00:10:04.200 Originally, feminists loved these strategies, but they were the best, because they gave women agency, right? 1.00

00:10:08.480 But then they started hating it, because they're like, it paints women in a bad light.

00:10:11.200 So they came up with this genuinely insane strategy that women were cheating for genetic variability. 0.88

00:10:19.460 What?

00:10:21.280 This was a feminist theory for why women cheat. 1.00

00:10:24.320 Yeah, that like women were better off having more genetic variability in their offspring. 1.00

00:10:28.860 Oh, okay.

00:10:29.800 So, okay, to have different baby daddies for all their children, because if they happened to reproduce with one man who just had terrible cancer risk, at least that was only passed on to one of her children.

00:10:41.200 Yeah, except the problem is that if you're doing the math of genetics, right, genetics doesn't exactly care about you as an individual, right?

00:10:51.040 So, because it all washes out in the math, it actually doesn't matter if you had the kids with one partner or with multiple partners.

00:11:00.640 Do you understand why that would wash out in the math?

00:11:02.760 So, as me, as an individual, right, I have statistically increased the odds that one of my offspring will survive if my partner had whatever potential disease.

00:11:18.780 But the individual gene hasn't.

00:11:22.280 By that, what I mean is if I have five kids with one guy and five kids with another guy, okay, and I'm choosing from a pool of a thousand men, all right?

00:11:34.000 And half of the men in that pool, this gene that ends up with their children dying, if your kids get it, right?

00:11:41.700 And the other half of the men in that pool of a thousand men don't have that gene, okay?

00:11:45.760 And now me as a woman, I have two sets of potential genes.

00:11:49.240 One gene says cheat.

00:11:50.860 One gene says have 10 kids with one guy.

00:11:54.200 Statistically speaking, these genes actually get passed on at exactly the same rate.

00:12:00.280 Because genes don't care about you as an individual, okay?

00:12:04.320 I realize this might still be confusing for people, so I'll explain the math here in another way.

00:12:08.840 The probability that a gene gets transferred to the next generation is determined by the percentage of the children that the average carrier of that gene both has and survive.

00:12:20.820 So, we're going to put women into two categories. 1.00

00:12:24.300 One category, 50% of their genes are with one guy.

00:12:27.600 50% of their genes are with another guy.

00:12:29.200 This is called category one.

00:12:30.660 The second category, we're going to call category two.

00:12:33.400 They always have all of their kids with one guy, okay?

00:12:36.440 And so, we're going to assume to make the math easy that each of these women always has 10 kids. 1.00

00:12:40.800 We're also going to assume to make the math easy that guys exist in two categories, X and O.

00:12:46.900 If you have kids with an X guy, those kids all die for a genetic reason. 0.95

00:12:52.740 If you have kids with an O guy, those kids all survive, all right? 1.00

00:12:56.640 So, if you are a type one woman where 50% of your kids is one guy, 50% of your kids with another guy, you have three types of pairings you can have. 1.00

00:13:06.440 You either have an X-O pairing where you have 50% of your kids with an X guy and 50% of your kids with an O guy.

00:13:13.480 You have an XX pairing and you have an O-O pairing, all right? 0.72

00:13:17.360 So, how many of your kids are going to survive on average?

00:13:20.080 50%, all right?

00:13:21.720 Now, you have a category two pairing here.

00:13:24.160 In the category two pairing, you are monogamous, right?

00:13:27.400 So, you either have all of your kids are of the XX variety or of the O-O variety, right? 0.90

00:13:34.200 Because that's the only thing you have, right?

00:13:36.000 All of your kids are either with an X or with an O.

00:13:38.320 How many of your kids survive?

00:13:40.240 50%.

00:13:40.720 This does nothing to increase the survival odds of a gene.

00:13:44.980 It might increase the survival odds of your genes, but it doesn't do anything to increase the genetic selection pressure on a gene.

00:13:53.040 I don't need to go further on the math on that.

00:13:55.200 It's just like an interesting little math thing.

00:13:56.920 So, it doesn't make sense.

00:13:58.440 And even if you think about like the marginal utility of this, it's just the marginal utility isn't that high.

00:14:03.980 You know, especially when you consider the cost of cheating, which infanticide and stuff like that.

00:14:09.080 Men seem to have an infanticide instinct towards kids who are not their own.

00:14:12.340 Non-biological children living with a man have 3x the rate of dying. 0.71

00:14:17.660 You know, who knows why that's happening.

00:14:19.820 But we do know that our nearest ancestors, if you look at apes, you know, often when they move in to get the woman fertile again and to not care for another man's kids, they'll take the cubs and they will smash them on rocks. 0.93

00:14:28.740 And then we can look at civilization developing.

00:14:30.740 What does the Bible say to do to the young children of the areas that you conquer?

00:14:34.840 It says smash them on rocks.

00:14:36.220 So, this is a, we see it in our evolutionary ancestors.

00:14:39.620 We see it in the earliest writings of what you're supposed to do when you conquer a territory that we have access to.

00:14:45.160 And it doesn't exactly make the Bible look good to keep this in it.

00:14:48.560 So, I'm assuming that, yeah, humans have an instinct, an infanticide instinct, which makes the behavior really risky.

00:14:56.340 And you are at least pretending to be monogamous.

00:14:58.760 Yeah.

00:14:59.980 Yeah. 0.93

00:15:00.740 So, that's a ridiculous theory. 0.96

00:15:03.440 And I just need to note the ridiculous theory there and put it off to the side. 0.76

00:15:07.620 So, mate switching is the next theory that they go to.

00:15:10.760 Maybe.

00:15:11.820 What does mate switching mean?

00:15:14.080 I mean, that's what cheating is.

00:15:15.240 Mate switching is the one I just described, where they're looking for a better mate.

00:15:18.160 They're looking for a better mate than their existing mate. 1.00

00:15:20.800 But I've definitely heard this from women, right? 1.00

00:15:23.380 When women talk about why they're cheating. 1.00

00:15:25.320 I've never heard that, but okay.

00:15:26.920 I have seen people do it with me.

00:15:30.260 When I slept with people who had existing partners back when I was, you know, sexually immoral.

00:15:36.300 And I didn't really understand why sexual morality mattered.

00:15:38.880 Mate was whatever.

00:15:40.000 And, you know, I was a kid.

00:15:40.880 It's like...

00:15:41.220 Okay, you were the other man.

00:15:44.920 Women were cheating on their boyfriends with you, right? 0.99

00:15:47.240 Yeah.

00:15:47.640 And so...

00:15:47.980 And I'm telling you what?

00:15:49.640 Some of them...

00:15:50.640 Actually, I'd say it was pretty clear to me that...

00:15:53.020 Well, they...

00:15:54.180 What we'll get to is they seem to do it for all of these reasons.

00:15:57.300 Some of them just were clearly like, you're better genetically than my partner.

00:16:01.880 And I know I never could get a guy like you.

00:16:03.540 So thank you for dating to sleep with me.

00:16:05.700 And then others were like, clearly trying to upgrade to me.

00:16:11.400 To build a relationship with me.

00:16:13.360 And you can tell pretty quickly.

00:16:14.700 One of the challenges when studying sexuality is a core source of information we have on sexuality.

00:16:21.240 sexuality is our own arousal patterns.

00:16:24.100 But the problem is, is human arousal patterns are highly variable.

00:16:28.600 And so I can go out and collect lots of information like I did in the

00:16:31.980 Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, which we wrote.

00:16:34.680 But at other times, when I don't have a big survey in front of me,

00:16:38.000 I just have to guess based on my own arousal patterns.

00:16:40.820 And I just noticed something when I was going over this.

00:16:43.980 Which is that when I was sleeping with somebody else's partner,

00:16:51.240 my hotness standards would be lower than they were otherwise.

00:16:58.300 Because they were positively augmented, i.e. I gained more arousal from knowing I was sleeping

00:17:05.360 with somebody else's partner than I gained from knowing I was sleeping with a partner

00:17:10.180 that I had locked down. 0.59

00:17:12.180 And it's funny, just if anyone's like, oh, you're such a weirdo for saying this.

00:17:15.980 Trump has said the same thing.

00:17:17.640 So at least I know that I and Trump have this arousal pattern.

00:17:22.180 I suspect more guys might as well.

00:17:24.440 Because it would have been highly biologically advantageous that you are willing to make

00:17:29.600 compromises on the genetic fitness of an individual when it is unlikely that you are

00:17:34.500 going to have to raise the kids that you had with that individual.

00:17:38.240 Which is really interesting because I haven't seen that talked about in men.

00:17:41.240 But others were in the next category, which Robin Hanson actually came up with this category,

00:17:45.780 which is information gathering.

00:17:47.620 Maybe they don't really know their sexual marketplace value when they're trying to gauge

00:17:52.120 what sort of partner they can get.

00:17:53.980 Maybe they're trying to learn what sex is like.

00:17:57.400 This was actually a core strategy for me is that girls knew I was really discreet. 0.89

00:18:02.160 So they would recommend their friends to me as a way to gain sexual experience so that

00:18:06.760 they didn't embarrass themselves when they had their quote-unquote first time.

00:18:11.400 And I think a lot more girls do this than guys know. 1.00

00:18:14.620 And this is like a why, you know, you shouldn't try all this dark triad stuff.

00:18:18.820 You know, just be a decent human being, but also naturally dominant.

00:18:22.460 Maybe that's a rare thing.

00:18:24.580 When I say be a decent human being here, I mean being nice to women and treating them 0.98

00:18:30.300 with respect, I do not mean decent in an absolute or moral sense.

00:18:34.660 Obviously, sleeping with other people's partners or sleeping with a girl who you know is about 0.88

00:18:39.780 to go on a date and sleep with this guy who she likes for the first time so she can try

00:18:43.860 out sex, that's not a decent thing to do. 0.74

00:18:46.900 Like, I was not being a moral person back then.

00:18:51.620 But I didn't contextualize it that way back then because back then I was urban monoculture.

00:18:57.240 I had this utilitarian ethic sense, which is to say maximize the amount of positive

00:19:02.440 feelings in the world and that makes me a good person and what somebody doesn't know 0.97

00:19:07.300 doesn't hurt them and them having sex with me and me having sex with them, that feels 0.99

00:19:11.520 good. 0.61

00:19:12.240 Therefore, I have increased the amount of positive experiences in the world and I don't need

00:19:17.140 to think about what I just did.

00:19:18.880 But anyway, that is something that some women definitely do. 1.00

00:19:22.200 The next is investment strategy.

00:19:24.160 So, the classic example of the investment strategy is a woman's essentially just trying 1.00

00:19:28.420 to get investors. 0.99

00:19:29.580 So, you can think of this as a woman who has a kid and spends her day as a prostitute. 1.00

00:19:35.380 Like, why is she doing that? 0.99

00:19:36.700 Because she wants money for the kids. 1.00

00:19:37.920 She's not really trying to get pregnant from these other guys.

00:19:40.120 But you actually see this a lot where it's been studied in African tribes, infidelity behavior.

00:19:45.200 The investment strategy appears to be the predominant thing.

00:19:47.500 When people are subsistence living, getting that marginal additional income is incredibly

00:19:53.640 important.

00:19:54.520 And so, that makes sense to me.

00:19:57.180 Now-

00:19:57.640 I guess you could argue that many women, they may not actually be having sex with other 0.99

00:20:02.920 men, but they may be in a relationship.

00:20:05.160 And then, against their partners, their monogamous partners' knowledge and perhaps preference,

00:20:12.620 they may be on OnlyFans, for example, making money on the side.

00:20:17.540 Yeah.

00:20:18.060 Well, and I think here, interesting, I haven't mentioned this yet, but people might be asking,

00:20:23.480 why aren't I asking why men cheat?

00:20:24.940 From an evolutionary perspective, there is no question as to why men cheat.

00:20:28.880 It is obviously in a male's best interest, if they are living in a world where some women 0.99

00:20:32.980 are willing to cheat, to cheat.

00:20:34.420 Because me, sleeping with another person and getting them pregnant, does not lower the

00:20:39.260 number of kids I can have with my dedicated partner, my wife, right?

00:20:42.940 In other words, men who took the opportunity when they got it had more surviving offspring

00:20:48.580 and therefore, you know, that's a trait that is going to be evolved into a population.

00:20:54.700 Yeah, I've got to put the South Park thing here.

00:20:56.460 As you've all seen on the news, our country is facing a major crisis.

00:21:00.240 Why? 0.96

00:21:00.520 Why are rich, successful men suddenly going out and trying to have sex with lots of women?

00:21:05.860 Why would a man who's famous and makes tons of money use that to try and have sex with

00:21:11.000 lots of different women? 1.00

00:21:13.360 And these rich celebrities have perfectly good wives at home. 1.00

00:21:17.080 Why would they even think of sex with others? 1.00

00:21:19.400 Damn it! 1.00

00:21:21.160 I want answers! 0.99

00:21:23.300 Of course, we all know the normal healthy male thinks only of sex occasionally and has

00:21:27.740 no desire for sex with multiple partners.

00:21:29.680 You're absolutely right, of course.

00:21:31.720 Definitely true.

00:21:32.680 Yes, we all know that.

00:21:33.540 Go on.

00:21:34.400 Men cheat when they have the option to, if they don't feel that, if they feel often that

00:21:39.820 they can get away from it, is generally when men cheat.

00:21:43.440 For me, like, I have noticed that the desire to cheat has basically gone away entirely since

00:21:48.880 I started having lots of kids with you.

00:21:50.460 And I think that's just because I'm like, oh, it's just not worth any individual risk to

00:21:54.700 cheating for me anymore.

00:21:55.580 From a biological perspective, it sort of recoded my brain.

00:21:58.040 But, you know, there's just less desire, right?

00:22:01.500 Like, and I think that that also makes sense from a biological perspective.

00:22:05.920 But women, women can't necessarily have more kids by cheating, right? 1.00

00:22:11.560 Like, women's fertility, presumably, if they stay with their husband and he is a healthy 0.96

00:22:16.760 male, they should be able to max out their lifetime fertility window. 0.99

00:22:20.240 Although, I guess there are examples in history of women who did know that it was a male factor

00:22:27.000 infertility issue, in which case they would...

00:22:29.860 This was the next reason, sterility.

00:22:31.940 Oh, okay.

00:22:34.100 So women may cheat, have a desire to cheat for the rare instance they're in their partner 1.00

00:22:39.900 is sterile.

00:22:40.520 And this also would likely increase women's instincts to cheat within our existing environment. 1.00

00:22:46.080 Because I suspect if you look at things like, you know, people talk about, what is it, like

00:22:49.920 the two-year itch, the seven-year itch, et cetera, right?

00:22:52.880 I suspect we have sort of pre-programmed into us the instinct to know when our partner might

00:22:58.740 be sterile.

00:22:59.460 And if you have been sexually active with somebody for a two-year period and they are not pregnant, 0.53

00:23:04.060 it means they're probably sterile.

00:23:06.800 And if you have been sexually active for a seven-year period and they're not pregnant, 0.95

00:23:10.480 they are 100% sterile, or you are. 0.79

00:23:14.040 And it makes genetic sense for both of you to try new partners.

00:23:17.340 This is why I think modern relationships just don't really work, because people aren't having

00:23:21.320 kids and the relationship is supposed to transition to the next phase.

00:23:25.220 Interesting.

00:23:26.920 Here, I wonder if this is part of why polyamory has become so common in our major cities.

00:23:32.700 If you have an environment where the vast majority of people are childless or

00:23:36.780 are functionally childless, because this is something I think people don't understand.

00:23:41.020 If you have one kid or two kids, you're functionally childless from an evolutionary genetic perspective.

00:23:47.040 A lot of people are like, well, what do you mean, like, you know, you have a lot of kids

00:23:49.980 with your partner and then the desire to cheat goes down.

00:23:52.220 And it's like, yeah, if your partner's regularly having kids.

00:23:54.980 But a lot of these celebrities, you know, they have two kids or one kid.

00:23:58.920 And from a biological perspective, if you're talking about, like, our evolutionary context

00:24:03.520 with how many of your children were likely to die, that's basically no kids.

00:24:07.540 So I wonder if these incredibly low fertility environments, cities, if everyone doesn't

00:24:14.040 at a biological level see their partner as sterile.

00:24:17.240 And that's why they're all desperately going out and sleeping with lots of other people.

00:24:20.840 And then I have to ask, well, in a low fertility environment, does that mean polyamory is a stable

00:24:26.000 relationship option?

00:24:27.680 I mean, it can be intrinsically unstable, but it might be more stable than monogamy where

00:24:32.640 you biologically assume your partner is sterile.

00:24:35.980 So the final reason why women might be doing this is protection, protection for their existing 0.98

00:24:41.460 kids.

00:24:42.480 This has been killing the children of women. 1.00

00:24:45.160 It's actually like kind of common in a lot of tribes.

00:24:49.540 So if you study a lot of anthropology, I like reading anthropology texts.

00:24:52.380 You'll often read of, like, a guy will get mad at a kid and just randomly kill them.

00:24:58.540 They are less likely to do that.

00:24:59.440 Their own children or?

00:25:01.160 No, other people's children.

00:25:02.320 Okay.

00:25:02.920 And if they're, like, a successful hunter, there's nothing you can do about that.

00:25:06.360 They'll, like, the kid annoyed me.

00:25:07.700 You know?

00:25:08.460 And, however, in those tribes, they're less likely to do that if they think the kid might

00:25:11.960 be theirs.

00:25:12.740 So women will sleep with these guys. 1.00

00:25:16.280 Well, for plausible deniability of, like, maybe this little shit's mine. 1.00

00:25:19.580 He pissed me off, but I'm not going to kill him. 1.00

00:25:22.400 Yeah.

00:25:23.220 Oh, interesting.

00:25:25.380 Okay.

00:25:25.660 So I thought you were going to say protection for, like, because it's a dangerous person

00:25:32.280 in the neighborhood.

00:25:33.280 And the sleeping with them is an act of payment to keep them in your good graces.

00:25:39.260 But what you're saying is it's no.

00:25:41.340 If you have children and they think it might be theirs, that's protection. 0.51

00:25:44.440 That only works in a small, like, insular community.

00:25:47.720 So that wouldn't be a common reason for women cheating today. 1.00

00:25:51.580 So the common reasons for women cheating today, I guess, in a modern, developed, urban 0.97

00:25:56.860 society would probably be information gathering or hypergamy. 1.00

00:26:03.380 Well, so this is interesting.

00:26:04.540 So you're going to have these pre-evolved reasons to cheat.

00:26:06.740 And then the question is, is which are most active in modern communities?

00:26:09.840 Yes.

00:26:10.220 But, but, but also what's really interesting is, is, and I think that this is not something

00:26:15.720 that is like in the psychologist community, it's sort of a fight between these models.

00:26:19.840 And I'm like, well, you know, you can have multiple evolutionary strategies operating

00:26:23.700 simultaneously.

00:26:24.860 Totally.

00:26:25.260 If people are familiar with our two, two of my favorite sexual strategies that we came

00:26:30.840 up with after writing The Fragment of the Sky to Sexuality are both dual strategies.

00:26:34.960 And they came from us understanding that humans exist in a variety of circumstances and might

00:26:40.200 have polymorphic behavioral patterns.

00:26:42.080 That means the same genes can encode for two different phenotypes or two different behavior

00:26:47.120 patterns.

00:26:47.960 So in human females, we argue that it's likely a polymorphic thing. 1.00

00:26:52.320 The more partners that they sleep with, like if a woman in a historic context had like 10 0.80

00:26:56.880 partners, it almost always meant she was a sex slave. 1.00

00:27:00.980 If she had been captured, her village had been raided and she was being used by the population.

00:27:05.940 And if she was not that, you know, because most of the successful widespread cultures,

00:27:11.900 well, a huge chunk of the like small random cultures will get like 89% are polygynous.

00:27:16.580 Most tend towards monogamous when you're talking about the big successful cultures in history

00:27:20.000 that most humans lived under.

00:27:22.540 So, you know, but, but, but even the big successful cultures were allowed to keep sex slaves. 0.99

00:27:27.080 You know, Muslims were allowed to keep a form of sex slaves. 1.00

00:27:30.280 Jews were allowed to keep a form of sex slave. 0.99

00:27:32.420 I don't know if early Christians were, but like even, even the Abrahamic tree, you know, 0.63

00:27:35.700 like it's, it's, it's, it's common in history, buddy.

00:27:38.640 And so it would have been advantageous to women in that environment to have a mechanism for knowing 1.00

00:27:44.140 they're in that environment and to then become turned on by the type of sex they would have

00:27:50.020 in that environment to not be killed by their partner who likely doesn't value their life

00:27:54.420 very much so that they get some chance at passing on their genes.

00:27:58.160 And then in the other scenario for the monogamous scenario, women are much better off just forming 1.00

00:28:03.800 an intense, dedicated attraction to an individual.

00:28:05.980 And you actually see this in the data.

00:28:07.840 Women who have not slept around very much tend to form an instinctual, really strong relation 0.55

00:28:13.960 with one of the first people they sleep with, often with the first person they sleep with,

00:28:17.720 basically instantly fall in love with that person.

00:28:19.360 They get a strong dose of oxytocin from the sexual encounters.

00:28:22.940 I've seen this with girls I've dated in the past.

00:28:25.160 Like if they were virgins and I really slept with virgins dispositionally, like probably

00:28:30.660 25% of the people I slept with were virgins because I preferred virgins. 0.88

00:28:34.660 I know that's horrible, but I think most guys sort of instinctually do.

00:28:38.620 And it affected the way I perceived them in the same way that when somebody had slept with

00:28:41.460 a lot of people that affects the way I see them from an arousal standpoint and a biological

00:28:45.960 reason that would be the case. 0.97

00:28:47.280 It's not like, I'm just a jerk here. 0.98

00:28:49.900 So anyway, the virgins are very common. 0.97

00:28:51.700 They like instantly fall in love and form this really strong attachment.

00:28:54.500 Yeah, that was, that makes sense.

00:28:57.180 So there you basically have two female sexual patterns. 1.00

00:28:59.380 One is I form an immediate attachment to the first person I sleep with, monogamous optimized.

00:29:03.700 The other is if I'm being passed around a lot, I turn violentosexual, which you can read

00:29:09.680 in our stuff.

00:29:10.380 Women liking sexual violence is actually really common in American.

00:29:13.520 If you look at like porn searches, there was a book, A Million Little Thoughts or something 0.61

00:29:19.000 like that, that showed that the violent porn searches are actually more common among women 0.98

00:29:22.660 than men.

00:29:23.520 And they're, and we found really high rates of violence preference from women in our study

00:29:29.120 as well.

00:29:29.580 And I actually asked Aila, could she look by partner numbers?

00:29:33.200 She hasn't published this, but she's looked at her own number.

00:29:35.160 She said, yeah, it checks out.

00:29:36.560 Partner number, women with really high body counts prefer sexual violence and often, you 0.99

00:29:42.060 know, choking other forms of like extreme dominance, consensual non-consent, stuff like

00:29:46.220 that.

00:29:46.840 And they seem to have a preference for this polyamorous lifestyle, which is sort of modeling what it

00:29:51.440 would have been like, to be honest, to be a sex life.

00:29:54.320 So anyway, can women recover from this? 1.00

00:29:56.300 I don't know, they might be able to and rebuild this old mindset, but like there wouldn't be

00:29:59.760 a strong evolutionary reason to recover from it because sex slaves very rarely turned monogamous,

00:30:04.180 historically speaking.

00:30:05.600 Then men have a dual strategy as well.

00:30:07.940 And the male dual strategy is, I argue that men would have had two core environments where

00:30:14.560 they would have been impregnating people. 1.00

00:30:16.040 Okay. 1.00

00:30:16.420 One is sex slaves. 1.00

00:30:18.760 When you are raiding a settlement, when you are, you know, going out there, pillaging a 0.97

00:30:22.640 village, doing war, you want to have a biological instinct to impregnate as many of these people

00:30:27.920 whose partners you've just killed, you know, and we see this in modern religious texts from

00:30:31.540 the period.

00:30:31.940 It basically says, yeah, they're fair game.

00:30:33.560 They're daughters, they're wives, you do these rituals, but after that, they're fair game. 0.98

00:30:37.400 And we know, we know this happened historically speaking.

00:30:39.980 So I need to have a sexual optimization function designed for that. 1.00

00:30:44.120 And then I need a separate sexual optimization function designed for a monogamous wife who is 1.00

00:30:49.520 going to be much lower quality if she thinks I'm going to treat her that way. 1.00

00:30:53.160 Right.

00:30:55.000 And so it means that I suspect that men actually get turned on by two different sets of things,

00:31:01.120 depending on the context they're in.

00:31:02.700 Do they think this person is a long-term partner of theirs?

00:31:04.960 And your body can tell if it's a long-term partner, then you're going to be aroused by

00:31:08.400 doing specific things with them.

00:31:09.940 But do you think this person isn't a long-term partner?

00:31:12.020 Then you're going to be doing other things.

00:31:13.300 And that's why I suspect the disposability and sort of male porn consumption, right?

00:31:17.340 Because you're looking at the disposable asset, very violent often compared to other stuff.

00:31:21.720 And that's because the men are perceiving these as a disposable sexual partner, not

00:31:25.200 as a long-term sexual partner.

00:31:26.980 And it causes young men to misgage their own sexuality.

00:31:29.800 They think that they're this violentosexual type, this extreme dominance type.

00:31:33.920 When it's really, no, you're just that because you haven't had a long-term partner yet and

00:31:39.000 you don't know what your real sexuality is yet because you haven't had a chance to try it.

00:31:42.320 You are judging your sexuality based on the porn you're consuming, which is not an accurate 0.78

00:31:46.080 representation of your sexuality.

00:31:47.680 So those theories are uniquely ours.

00:31:49.320 I'd love to see them get out there in the world of sexual research.

00:31:51.440 But the point being is they assume multiple types of sexual strategies overlapping.

00:31:55.180 So I want to get to a study that was done recently, but I want to hear any thoughts you have before

00:31:58.860 I do.

00:32:00.400 Well, I'm curious what you think the modern guy listener to this podcast should be taking

00:32:06.560 away from it in terms of like, if he doesn't want to be cheated on, what should he be doing?

00:32:11.240 Aside from being, trying to become a dominant, high-class billionaire mob?

00:32:20.960 Well, actually, cheating is a really replicated behavior, which we'll get to when we get to

00:32:25.260 the stats after this.

00:32:26.180 So the number one thing you can do is not marry a cheater.

00:32:28.140 Oh, okay.

00:32:30.740 So once a cheater, always a cheater.

00:32:32.360 If someone cheated, if they even cheated on you, they're going to cheat again.

00:32:35.720 Not 100%.

00:32:36.100 We'll get into the statistics in a second.

00:32:37.860 But yeah, you have a higher probability.

00:32:40.200 And it appears that it's not just like the cheating is trained into them.

00:32:44.200 It appears that there might be like a cheating genotype, i.e.

00:32:46.860 that there might be some polygenic score, essentially, for a preference for cheating, which makes

00:32:52.440 sense that, you know, you would have different sexual strategies within different populations

00:32:56.600 and cultures that are rewarded in different ways.

00:32:59.340 Like, anyway, I'll continue here.

00:33:01.140 So he found, he was doing a study because he's trying to figure out, okay, is it mate

00:33:05.160 switching?

00:33:06.080 Is it better genes?

00:33:06.980 Is that more like it?

00:33:07.720 And he found that men rated their partners, who they're currently with, as better parents

00:33:14.760 than the people they cheated with.

00:33:16.100 And that they rated the people they were cheating with, as more attractive.

00:33:21.940 And that women did the same thing. 1.00

00:33:23.440 Women rated their partners, who they were with, as better parents. 0.50

00:33:27.180 And the people they were cheating with, as more attractive.

00:33:30.900 Okay?

00:33:31.440 And so he took this to mean, he's like, oh, this means better genes hypothesis is probably

00:33:36.000 right.

00:33:36.480 And I'm like, what?

00:33:38.980 No, it doesn't.

00:33:40.100 Okay, first of all, what you should have been asking is, are they a better source of resources?

00:33:45.100 Because that's really what the Beta Bucks Alpha S hypothesis is about.

00:33:50.860 It's not, are they better parents?

00:33:52.660 Of course, people are going to have an instinctual biological bond with their biological child

00:33:58.260 and better of parent them.

00:33:59.700 We know this from the research.

00:34:01.540 Biological parents try harder than non-biological parents. 1.00

00:34:04.500 So, of course, the biological father of your child is going to treat that child better than

00:34:11.100 the guy you're effing on the side.

00:34:13.100 Like, anyone who's broadly sane would know this.

00:34:16.280 And then he was like, oh, and it's really interesting here that, you know, men found the people that

00:34:22.500 they were sleeping with outside the relationship better.

00:34:25.080 Like, why would they do that?

00:34:26.100 It's like, because novelty is really important to male sexuality.

00:34:29.200 Obviously, you get a huge genetic reward if you can sleep with someone and get somebody

00:34:33.080 else to raise your kids.

00:34:34.300 Right now, let's go over some stats, okay?

00:34:36.080 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:36.760 So, one funny study found that 20% of men and 13% of married women admitted to having sex

00:34:42.480 with somebody outside of their marriage, averaging to 16% overall.

00:34:46.180 Wow, that's how they're likely to cheat than women. 1.00

00:34:50.620 Yeah, I mean, everyone thinks it's just men who cheat, though.

00:34:53.400 And that's what blows my mind.

00:34:55.100 It blows my mind that women cheat at all. 1.00

00:34:58.060 But here's the thing, a 2021 survey, so the problem with the cheating data I get is it's

00:35:01.960 all over the place.

00:35:03.020 So, a 2021 study by health testing sitters polled 441 people, and it found that a little

00:35:08.500 over 46% of respondents in monogamous relationships said they had had affairs.

00:35:12.900 Oh, that's because this is looking at monogamous relationships and not marriages.

00:35:15.840 So, 46, around half of people have cheated.

00:35:18.380 Nearly 24% of marriages affected by infidelity report staying together.

00:35:22.300 47.5% of relationships affected by cheating said that they established and enforced new

00:35:27.160 relationship rules, such as sharing phone passwords, to minimize the likelihood of more

00:35:31.620 affairs.

00:35:32.420 And that's actually important.

00:35:33.540 Like, what's the consequences of cheating?

00:35:35.680 The relationship rules need to be restructured in favor of the person who is cheated against

00:35:39.680 often.

00:35:40.400 Recent studies estimate that approximately 1% to 3% of men are unknowingly raising a child

00:35:46.420 that is not biologically theirs.

00:35:47.840 A 2022 study published by Human Reproduction found that 11% of men seeking paternity testing

00:35:54.020 services were not the biological fathers of the children.

00:35:57.220 For general estimates, these range between 0.6% and 0.9% of men.

00:36:01.400 So, I'll make a note here.

00:36:03.540 There's this myth that around 30% of people are raising kids that are not their own.

00:36:07.300 That actually came from men that were already highly suspicious.

00:36:10.160 It's actually probably under 1% or maybe between 1% to 3%, depending on who you're at.

00:36:14.780 That's comforting.

00:36:15.220 But this is in the developed world where you have contraception.

00:36:21.160 If you look outside of environments where contraceptive in common, you get to rates around 20% to 30%.

00:36:29.400 Actually, if you look at cheating in these environments, it's often higher.

00:36:33.300 So, in a sub-secretary area in Africa, you get the 20% to 30% extramarital sex rate.

00:36:38.220 And for women, it's 5% to 15%. 0.99

00:36:40.460 So, this is other interesting statistics here.

00:36:43.440 Recent studies suggested that the prevalence of infidelity is underreported due to the way individuals are questioned about behaviors.

00:36:49.480 Direct questioning revealed that 9% of women and 17% of men acknowledged to being unfaithful.

00:36:54.120 However, participants were provided with a checklist to identify specific sexual behaviors outside the primary relationship.

00:36:59.700 And the numbers changed dramatically.

00:37:01.140 The results gathered from the checklist found that 15% of women and 27% of men engaged in extramarital sex rate.

00:37:06.700 Oh, so they're like, I mean, giving head doesn't count as cheating, obviously.

00:37:12.960 Yeah, well, the study was from 2018.

00:37:15.800 It's called Who Cheats More?

00:37:17.040 The Demographics of Infidelity in America.

00:37:18.540 This is interesting.

00:37:22.500 Surprisingly, 56% of cheating men and 34% of cheating women consider their marriages happy. 0.69

00:37:28.180 So, I think that this is another thing where a lot of people are like, well, I'm in a happy marriage.

00:37:33.740 Therefore, my partner won't cheat.

00:37:35.820 And unfortunately, that's just not what the data says.

00:37:38.040 Here is another study that looked at this.

00:37:40.840 A meta-analysis of 12 infidelity studies among married couples found that 31% of men and 16% of women had a sexual affair that entailed no emotional investment.

00:37:50.340 13% of men and 21% of women had been romantically involved but not sexually involved with someone other than their spouse.

00:37:55.720 And 20% of men and women had engaged in an affair that included both a sexual and emotional connection.

00:38:01.400 So, that's really – men and women actually cheat the exact same amount when you average sexual and emotional cheating.

00:38:09.380 It's just that women or women – 1.00

00:38:10.740 When you count both.

00:38:12.200 Yeah.

00:38:12.440 So, it's 20% of men and women engaged in an affair that included both.

00:38:16.400 So, they do it the same when it's both.

00:38:18.220 But if you're looking at emotional cheating, women do it more. 1.00

00:38:20.320 And if you look at sexual cheating, men do it more.

00:38:22.520 Do you think men care about emotional cheating, though?

00:38:25.500 Well, I mean, in studies, they just don't.

00:38:28.200 Not as much.

00:38:29.100 They care a little.

00:38:29.380 I think the thing is – the thing is, I think men do physical – like having sex with other people physically where there's no emotional component I think would probably bother the average female partner less than an emotional affair.

00:38:44.940 And I think that for men, an emotional affair that a woman has would probably bother him less than a physically sexual affair that she has. 0.85

00:38:53.440 So, it's probably nice that –

00:38:55.480 This is well studied in the data, what you said.

00:38:57.600 A lot of studies have been done on this, and that's consistently found across cultures.

00:39:00.960 Yeah.

00:39:01.740 I would definitely freak out a lot more if you had, like, a really strong emotional connection with another woman. 1.00

00:39:07.280 And I would freak out a lot more if I knew you were having sex with another man. 1.00

00:39:10.720 Really? 0.97

00:39:11.260 That's – yeah.

00:39:11.880 So, there you go.

00:39:12.800 You know?

00:39:13.100 I don't even know if I care that much if I felt you had an emotional connection with another man.

00:39:16.120 How would you feel if I podcasted with another man?

00:39:18.740 I would be devastated if you podcasted with another woman. 1.00

00:39:21.380 Well, we have an episode with Ayla where it's just me and her that haven't gone live yet.

00:39:24.940 That's true.

00:39:25.880 No, wait.

00:39:26.340 That's gone live.

00:39:27.140 No, no.

00:39:27.520 We recorded two episodes that day, so one of them hasn't gone live yet.

00:39:30.440 Oh, yeah.

00:39:31.120 Well, I was out door knocking in the cold, pregnant.

00:39:34.240 You are so hardworking, Simone.

00:39:36.000 You are.

00:39:37.040 This is why I can't leave you.

00:39:38.600 Anyway, so here's an interesting thing.

00:39:40.840 So, men are most likely to cheat between – like, when they're young.

00:39:44.120 Like, back when I used to do it, right?

00:39:46.440 Yeah, like when their testosterone levels are higher, and then when they become more pair-bonded and –

00:39:51.140 Wait.

00:39:51.980 As men age, their testosterone levels probably go –

00:39:55.360 Yeah, they go down.

00:39:56.320 They go down when they're in a monogamous relationship, and they go down when they have kids.

00:39:59.160 So, basically, evolutionarily successful men have low testosterone.

00:40:02.760 I got my levels tested recently because I assumed they were low, and apparently they're not low.

00:40:08.160 Yeah, they're high.

00:40:09.520 Now I know why they're not low because I did a 23 on me scan – not a 23 on me.

00:40:14.320 It was a –

00:40:15.320 No, this was your nebula scan where you got your –

00:40:18.040 Yeah, and it showed that I was in the 99th percentile in terms of testosterone rate.

00:40:22.420 Yeah.

00:40:22.520 The predictedness due to my genes, and like, that makes sense.

00:40:25.100 We've done other episodes where I sort of talk about, like, a lot of people don't know what high testosterone looks like,

00:40:29.760 and I have a face that looks like a picture of a diagram of what somebody who developed in a high testosterone –

00:40:35.320 Yeah, I don't know where this trope of soy doesn't seem to correlate with actual –

00:40:41.320 No, it doesn't, because Andrew Tate is – like, his face is the picture of a low testosterone man.

00:40:47.100 I think the whole soy boy thing more correlates with, like, how much time you spend in a gym

00:40:53.420 and how developed your various gym-related muscles look.

00:40:58.560 And I mean it when I say gym-related muscles.

00:41:01.920 Muscles that really aren't going to show up unless you actually spend time preening like a woman. 1.00

00:41:06.820 Well, yeah, it's about socially signaling to other men.

00:41:08.820 We've talked about this.

00:41:09.480 I mean it is preening in a feat, and that's why women – 1.00

00:41:12.580 I mean there's all the memes from the gym bros that, like, they imagine that they're going to get fit

00:41:16.260 and it's going to be women fawning over them, but it's just other gym bros. 1.00

00:41:18.180 It's just men fawning over them. 1.00

00:41:19.580 Women don't care. 1.00

00:41:21.320 It's so – like, there's – I've read a decent number of romance novels and listened to a decent –

00:41:26.680 you know, I've been exposed to this content.

00:41:31.240 Less than 1% of this stuff has to do with any sort of description of musculature.

00:41:38.260 Absolutely.

00:41:40.740 Status, dominance in terms of bearing matter.

00:41:46.240 Being tall matters.

00:41:47.800 Dominance in terms of bearing as well is confidence and presence.

00:41:51.200 Yeah, confidence and presence.

00:41:52.800 You can't be weasley, you can't be insecure, you can't be –

00:41:56.720 But muscles, I don't really hear described that much.

00:42:01.540 It's just interesting.

00:42:02.540 Well, and this is one of the reasons.

00:42:03.500 People are like, why do you mention, like, that you've slept with lots of people and stuff like that?

00:42:06.720 And it's because it's important in qualifying a big mistake in our society that in terms of securing a partner leads a lot of men to make big mistakes in terms of time investment calculation.

00:42:18.380 And that they are investing a lot of time in honing their body more than they need to for health reasons or actually finding a partner.

00:42:25.060 If you are doing enough exercise to be at optimum health, okay, you are going to be at optimum for finding most partners except for ones with fairly rare fetishes.

00:42:35.300 And that's unfortunately just the way it is and it leads to miscalculations where actually it's more about, like, presence and ambition for the future.

00:42:44.580 Because, you know, they're thinking about who am I going to spend my life with, right?

00:42:46.860 Like, that's what they care about.

00:42:48.040 We've talked about that enough in another episode.

00:42:49.220 I actually was talking a lot with Simone about this afterwards and what we came to was it appears that men are confusing intersexual signaling competitions with intrasexual signaling.

00:43:06.300 So, to word this a different way, the ways that men are signaling in terms of bodybuilding is specifically signaling to other men and not to women.

00:43:20.320 It's like, okay, if you think about, like, the classic girl crushes from various generations, girls were able to go and watch the Marvel movie, right?

00:43:31.160 Filled with all sorts of buff, masculine characters.

00:43:35.300 Who was the predominant girl crush coming out of that movie?

00:43:38.240 It was Loki.

00:43:39.180 Like, everyone knows it was Loki, right?

00:43:41.220 Or you go to, like, the Tumblr sexy boy era.

00:43:44.720 You know, who were they thirsting after?

00:43:47.560 It was characters like the Once-ler from Freaking Insane, right? 0.99

00:43:52.460 You know, or Alistair from Has-Been Hotel.

00:43:56.580 And then the Jimbros, who do they look like from popular media, right? 0.98

00:44:02.340 They look like He-Man. 0.91

00:44:03.500 But He-Man wasn't made for girls.

00:44:08.320 He-Man was made for boys. 0.97

00:44:11.040 He-Man was an aspirational look for intersexual hierarchy battles among men.

00:44:19.120 Or who else from popular media?

00:44:21.680 Conan the Barbarian.

00:44:22.860 They look like Conan the Barbarian.

00:44:24.640 But again, Conan the Barbarian is meant to sell to men.

00:44:29.660 And then another huge mistake that people will be, they'll be like, well, I can look at this study, right?

00:44:35.080 Like, I can go and I can line up men by muscle and then ask women to choose which of these men are you going to prefer.

00:44:45.040 And they'll choose the more muscular men.

00:44:46.540 And it's like, yeah, that may be true, but that's not how women actually choose or relate to mates. 0.99

00:44:51.920 You're putting up a visual test instead of a test of vibe, which is how women actually relate to things. 1.00

00:44:59.240 Remember, it's vibe, presence, confidence.

00:45:01.900 So don't, you know, the male influencers who have a vested interest in telling you, oh, you have to strive for this aspirational body type that I have and you do not have.

00:45:15.300 Consider Chris Williamson.

00:45:16.860 I love the guy, right?

00:45:18.500 He has this body type that would be this aspirational body type, but he doesn't have a wife, okay?

00:45:23.900 He doesn't have kids. 0.98

00:45:25.200 He's a genetic failure.

00:45:26.960 And I'm pretty sure he's older than me, too.

00:45:28.900 If you look at what the men look like in the actual books that women are reading to get off, in these actual female romance books, as Simone says, they're just often not these He-Man-looking characters.

00:45:44.460 If you look at the fan art that the teenage girls are drawing of their crushes, they don't look like this, okay?

00:45:53.000 They are generally lean and skinny.

00:45:56.520 I actually think that the best representation of men misunderstanding, they'll hear all of this.

00:46:03.000 They'll hear, women want confidence. 1.00

00:46:05.840 And then they will go online and mock a guy for acting, quote-unquote, faggy and saying that he's not going to get a girl. 0.99

00:46:14.260 There is perhaps few better pictures of male confidence than the flamboyant gay man. 1.00

00:46:22.180 And as somebody with lots of female friends, women find flamboyant gay men hot. 1.00

00:46:28.660 You are misunderstanding what women want, and it's part of why so many men today struggle to in any way capture female attention.

00:46:40.800 I want to keep going on stuff we haven't talked about, which is women actually cheat the most when they're over 65. 1.00

00:46:47.240 Older women are the highest. 1.00

00:46:48.780 This trope, there's, I don't know if you've seen this, but there is this trope in media of old person homes where there's obviously fewer men because men on average die much earlier. 0.99

00:46:59.280 And women are just thirsty, and there's this trope of the man who is just drowning in pussy in the old person home. 0.98

00:47:07.900 Well, there's actually an evolutionary reason for this. 1.00

00:47:10.260 What? Why?

00:47:11.640 Okay, so let's talk about it. 0.90

00:47:13.540 If you were post-menopausal, I wouldn't really care if you were sexually intimate with other men. 0.76

00:47:19.320 On reflection, my opinion of this may change as I get older because I realized that when I was thinking of a post-menopausal Simone, I was thinking of an old-looking lady.

00:47:29.220 And I was like, well, I don't find old-looking women attractive, so I guess we just won't be sexually active at that point in our lives. 1.00

00:47:35.080 And now I'm like, well, but I'll be older than two.

00:47:37.720 And I don't know if I would have found Simone attractive at this age when I was younger as well.

00:47:43.140 So, you think the issue is that these women feel like their partners are comfortable with it, and that's why they're going for it? 0.86

00:47:51.440 It's not that their partners are – it is that the possessiveness I would have of you as a sexual partner would just naturally decrease when you're no longer fertile.

00:48:02.500 Why would that influence my interest in cheating?

00:48:05.320 Hold, hold, hold.

00:48:07.300 We've got to get to this, okay?

00:48:08.400 Okay.

00:48:08.580 So, first, we've got to think about this from an evolutionary perspective, right?

00:48:11.800 Like, post-menopausal women sleeping around has almost no genetic risk to the male.

00:48:19.000 There just isn't a genetic risk.

00:48:20.540 Yeah, yeah, you're not talking about the women, though.

00:48:22.740 Hold on, listen, listen.

00:48:23.940 We have to keep going with the men because it matters to the women. 1.00

00:48:26.620 Okay.

00:48:28.300 However, are the benefits still there?

00:48:31.120 Could you secure additional resources from other men by sleeping with them after you have borne all my kids, 0.73

00:48:37.820 and I know that you are raising and passing those resources down to the kids?

00:48:40.760 Yes, there are benefits to you and my kids from you sleeping around post-menopausal speaking because you can, at the nursing home, build connections with other people, get resources from other people, and there's no longer any real risk.

00:48:57.680 One of the things to note here, right?

00:49:01.300 What is this?

00:49:01.940 What do you think is so funny about this?

00:49:03.040 I'm just picturing, like, you and me sitting on rocking chairs overlooking a field, and you're like,

00:49:09.300 Simone, why don't you go out to that old person home and mess around? 1.00

00:49:14.600 Especially if you were getting a benefit from it.

00:49:17.040 Oh, my God.

00:49:17.520 Like, if I knew you were sleeping with some billionaire, and you were post-menopausal, and I got, you know, like, a person ended up investing in one of our kids, like, $10 million in one of our kids' companies.

00:49:29.500 No, I'm sorry.

00:49:31.600 I just.

00:49:34.340 I'm just saying.

00:49:35.380 They can find $10 million elsewhere.

00:49:37.340 You also don't know how instinctually you're going to change when you become post-menopausal.

00:49:43.340 The rate of women cheating post-menopausally goes up astronomically.

00:49:46.960 It's like 4x or something what it is at other times of their life.

00:49:50.080 Yeah, but, you know, as we've seen in our sexuality research, people's sexuality tends to stay pretty stable, and I am pretty sure that means I'm going to remain asexual but gay for Malcolm.

00:50:02.800 It's not like I'm going to reach some.

00:50:04.320 Yeah, maybe, and I should say, I wouldn't be, like, super awesome chilled with it, but I would weigh the benefit if you were post-menopausal.

00:50:12.940 Let's just.

00:50:14.660 Let's move on from the conversation of whoring out 70-year-old Simone.

00:50:18.640 And they're like, I would give you $50 million to sleep with your wife. 0.97

00:50:25.640 Like, I wouldn't even think about it.

00:50:27.780 I wouldn't even think about it.

00:50:30.020 Wonderful.

00:50:30.500 Wonderful.

00:50:31.580 No, but it's, it's, it's, it's, but if you're post-menopausal, I'd be like, well, hold on.

00:50:35.880 That $50 million could matter a lot to my kids in terms of their quality of life, their ability to have kids.

00:50:41.660 I mean, how many surrogates could I get with that for additional women now that your body's no longer useful to me? 0.99

00:50:45.960 It's useful in a new way.

00:50:47.640 We got to keep reproducing here, Simone.

00:50:50.400 You know, keep your eye on the prize, Malcolm.

00:50:53.120 Okay.

00:50:53.500 What I love about you.

00:50:54.220 Here's, here's another one that I think you'd find really funny.

00:50:57.340 So in a gleaning survey covering 8,000 respondents, 57% of women and 62% of men admitted to having an affair while they were away on a business trip, which is really interesting because that's way higher than any of the normal numbers, but it's for people specifically who go on business trips.

00:51:14.300 Okay. So when dating people, if you are really not in to being cheated on, ask them how frequently they travel for business, because that's a red flag right there.

00:51:24.780 That's really useful. That's, I want, I want actionable, actionable advice for our listeners today.

00:51:30.460 You want to hear another crazy study. According to a study in computers in human behavior, 18% to 25% of Tinder users are in a committed relationship while using the app.

00:51:40.840 But if you look at Americans only, this number skyrocketed to 42%.

00:51:46.340 So around half of Tinder users are using it to have an affair, which is actually a really important thing that we used to be able to avoid using something called Facebook official.

00:51:55.820 So it used to be historically when I was dating, the norm was when a relationship got serious, like a huge escalation in the relationship status that was like, I wouldn't say halfway to getting engaged, but it was like a, now this is an official.

00:52:07.200 Yeah. Yeah. I remember. Yeah. Facebook relationship status was a big signaler. Although I want to go even further back to pretend that you're single.

00:52:14.700 I want to go further back to my little, you know, 1950s, 1960s coronet films, like those little instructional videos that were played in high schools for students, giving them social norms.

00:52:25.740 I was really stunned when one on dating really made it clear that at least dating in high school was you were dating multiple people and monogamy within dating.

00:52:37.600 If you weren't going to get engaged or married, it was kind of expected that you as a woman would see multiple guys and that a guy would see multiple women.

00:52:45.240 And now I think the important thing is that people were not having sex. Maybe they were making out. Right. But they were not having sex because that was just not done.

00:52:55.760 At least in your high school. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm saying in the 40s through 60s. Oh, probably 40s to 50s. I'm not slutty in the 60s.

00:53:03.960 But they, it was understood that when you were dating, because you're trying to find a partner, you should be dating multiple people. You should be playing the field.

00:53:13.100 So to me, to a certain extent, I think about people dating on Tinder.

00:53:16.500 Yeah, sure. If you're dating, you should be dating a lot of people at the same time concurrently. I think this concept-

00:53:23.400 No, no, hold on, hold on. They had a Facebook official in the 50s and 40s. Do you remember what it was?

00:53:29.280 Going steady.

00:53:29.800 No, it wasn't just going steady. It was a way to signal honestly. So Facebook official-

00:53:34.580 Oh, the class ring, the promise ring?

00:53:36.240 It was the letterman jacket.

00:53:39.020 Oh, that too.

00:53:39.900 You would give the girl your letterman jacket and she would wear it around so everyone knew that was your girl and knew you were taken.

00:53:47.380 So you couldn't-

00:53:48.220 Well, yeah. And going steady too was a sign that you were more committed.

00:53:51.280 Did they also have a food ceremony that they would do?

00:53:53.460 Yeah, but that was for when people were basically pre-engaged and the plan was that they were going to get married and people were dating to get married.

00:54:01.880 And I think the important thing is in an ecosystem in which people are dating to get married, you are dating multiple people concurrently.

00:54:08.240 And this concept that people, when dating, like when finding someone on Tinder and casually going on dates, then get horrified when it turns out that the person that they're dating is dating other people.

00:54:21.180 Well, why should you be horrified?

00:54:23.880 It actually makes a lot more sense to be dating multiple people at once instead of serial monogamy if the goal is to find a good partner for your life.

00:54:32.320 So I say we go back to it.

00:54:34.680 Well, so here's another fun stat you'll probably, just to be offensive.

00:54:39.120 Some studies have found higher rates of infidelity among black adults, 24% compared to white adults, 16%.

00:54:44.680 So that's an offensive stat.

00:54:46.520 But now I want to get to your question about how likely is somebody to cheat if they had cheated before.

00:54:52.060 So ESI means, well, I'll just say like extrasexual relationship.

00:54:54.980 Findings from logical regressions showed that those who reported engaging in extrasexual relationships in the first relationship were three times more likely to report in engaging in an extrasexual relationship in their next relationship compared to those who do not report engaging in extrasexual relationships.

00:55:08.960 I'm just picturing hecklefish saying, once a cheetah, always a cheetah.

00:55:13.420 Oh, gosh.

00:55:14.500 This is from Y Files, a great show if you guys haven't seen it.

00:55:17.040 Yeah, on YouTube.

00:55:18.260 Deserves its big audience.

00:55:19.320 Yeah.

00:55:19.660 Similarly, compared to those who reported that their first relationship partners did not engage in ESA, though in extrasexual relationship, those who knew that their partners in the first relationship had engaged in an extrasexual relationship were twice as likely to report the same behavior from their next partners.

00:55:36.400 Oh, my gosh.

00:55:37.780 So this is also like people being abused.

00:55:42.320 They just keep ending up in relationships in which they're abused and people being cheated on keep ending up in relationships in which they're being cheated on.

00:55:49.860 Yeah, well, and here's another thing.

00:55:51.280 Well, no, this is also like if you know that your partner has done this, the other thing is suspicion.

00:55:55.740 So those who were suspicious that their first partners did ESA in performant relationships had four times the rate of that suspicion in their current relationship.

00:56:04.960 So it appears you might also have like a genetic proclivity towards suspicion.

00:56:11.460 Fascinating.

00:56:13.500 Isn't that interesting?

00:56:14.860 Yeah.

00:56:15.940 And that's the studies that we have to go over here.

00:56:18.780 So what do you think?

00:56:20.200 And we go down to those initial reasons why women cheat. 0.99

00:56:22.400 I just think it's all of them.

00:56:23.620 I think all of them played some evolutionary role in humans.

00:56:27.740 I think the one thing I'd add is I suspect that there's a separate one, which is postmenopausal women that likely their sexuality transforms in some way where sexuality becomes more transactional for them. 1.00

00:56:37.960 Think about old people voting each other. 1.00

00:56:40.000 Let's just pretend it doesn't happen.

00:56:41.520 Okay.

00:56:42.040 Pretend it.

00:56:42.740 You know that this is where you have the highest rates of STDs.

00:56:45.760 I know, I know, and I don't want to know that.

00:56:49.180 It's one of those things that you just wish you didn't know.

00:56:53.120 But here's the thing.

00:56:54.360 I can't imagine ever finding an old woman attractive. 1.00

00:56:56.900 Like, I can't even imagine finding you attractive when you're old.

00:56:59.260 I don't know how this works.

00:57:02.240 Like, am I going to find you attractive?

00:57:04.440 I don't know.

00:57:05.020 I think you and I also approach sexuality very differently from other people.

00:57:09.720 I think for a lot of people, and we have to get back to this, too, that a lot of people think that they're talking about sex when really they're talking about validation.

00:57:19.240 They're talking about their own personal narrative and how they feel about themselves.

00:57:23.000 And maybe that's what's going on here.

00:57:24.480 You know, okay, yeah, it's like gross old people bodies, but sex was never about actually, you know, beyond your adolescence when, like, the hormones really are raging. 1.00

00:57:33.100 It was never really about, you know, all these things.

00:57:35.840 It was always about trying to satisfy some kind of perception of I'm the kind of person who has sex. 0.93

00:57:41.480 I need to go out and get sex.

00:57:43.060 And maybe that when people reach an age where they're retired and they have all this leisure time, they still haven't gotten past this understanding that success in life means that you're having a lot of sex and therefore they need to get it. 0.98

00:57:55.780 Yeah, yeah.

00:57:56.320 It's not fun, even if it's gross, even if it's not, you know, they need a lot of lubrication, whatever.

00:58:01.040 I just, let's, but let's not think of it.

00:58:02.680 Well, hold on. 0.69

00:58:03.040 I want to talk about another thing that I've always found really funny from an evolutionary standpoint is when lesbians get mad that guys don't care when their girlfriends or wives cheat on them with lesbians. 0.76

00:58:11.260 There isn't an evolutionary reason to be afraid of that.

00:58:14.180 Anything, it's a potential benefit because that's an additional sexual partner.

00:58:18.980 No, no, no, no, no.

00:58:20.540 And that's because I think the emotional cheating element of it is major.

00:58:23.540 No, but I'm talking men and men just don't care as much about it.

00:58:26.860 Oh, like if I slept with a girl, you'd be like, okay. 0.96

00:58:29.780 Yeah, a lot of lesbians get actively offended that guys don't care about this. 1.00

00:58:34.540 They're like, they don't see the relationship as the same.

00:58:36.860 I really don't want it.

00:58:38.920 I don't even, I feel like if anything, for most guys, it would be seen as like kind of hot, you know?

00:58:44.820 Yeah, disease transfer to, between women when they're having sexual encounters is incredibly rare.

00:58:50.380 Honestly, I feel like most women would probably improve their husband's sexual satisfaction of them if they had an extramarital affair with a female. 0.99

00:59:00.060 Even if that female had zero, like, you know, even if there was zero chance, it'd be a three-way. 0.99

00:59:05.340 Just because, like, they're thinking about their wife having sex with her. 0.99

00:59:08.980 Probably, yeah. 0.65

00:59:09.760 And the calculation that would be going on in my brain is, well, and what if, like, my wife actually falls for this person and is willing to then have another partner who I can impregnate in our marriage, right?

00:59:20.660 Like, it may structurally not be as stable, but it's more kids and more hands in the house.

00:59:27.000 Yeah, so you're just, yeah.

00:59:28.320 Yeah, I guess you're like, oh, like, and I could see this being a normal male response of, why not polygamy?

00:59:36.880 Why not?

00:59:38.060 I think someone will be like, oh, no, like, monogamy stands all the way. 0.98

00:59:41.600 But I think that, you know, most men, if they had enough wealth to the South Park thing again, they'd be like, yeah, it makes sense to press for that.

00:59:50.100 But, yeah, so I find that interesting as well, this very confused reaction as to why women would care when their husbands sleep with other men.

00:59:59.020 Because this does happen, and women get quite upset even when it's only sexual. 0.92

01:00:02.540 It's because, historically speaking, the disease transfer rate between male-male sex is incredibly high compared to any other form of sex you can have.

01:00:09.700 And it is really dangerous for a woman to have her husband be out there sleeping with other men, even though there's no risk of him, like, impregnating them and diverting resources.

01:00:20.160 Which is why, you know, fortunately, I'm not at risk there.

01:00:24.800 No, no, no temptation on that point, fortunately.

01:00:27.900 I mean, when I say fortunately, I don't mean anything about gay people. 1.00

01:00:29.780 I just mean they'd be harder. 0.96

01:00:30.840 No logistics.

01:00:31.860 When I was young, I remember before I went through puberty, I thought being bi would be easier.

01:00:36.660 Because I was like, well, then sometimes. 0.99

01:00:37.640 Well, it seems like being gay would be ideal, because, like, gay men are a lot easier to have sex. 1.00

01:00:44.500 I imagine. 1.00

01:00:45.220 I imagine, you know, because women are much more stingy. 1.00

01:00:47.280 Being bi as a man would be ideal before I knew what my sexuality was.

01:00:50.580 Yeah, because then any way in part of that.

01:00:51.140 My sexuality hadn't come out yet.

01:00:53.040 I was just like, well, nothing arouses me right now, so I wonder why.

01:00:55.700 Yeah, but let's hope I'm bi. 0.69

01:00:57.020 But a hand I'm going to get dealt.

01:00:58.600 And the hand I was hoping for was not straight.

01:01:00.840 It was bi.

01:01:01.620 Here was my logic.

01:01:03.240 Sound logic at the time, actually.

01:01:05.240 I said, I get a wider pool of sexual partners.

01:01:08.260 I can basically date anyone I want to.

01:01:09.860 And a portion of that pool, I will have full knowledge of what they want.

01:01:15.780 So that, you know, and they will have full knowledge of what I want.

01:01:18.620 So they'll likely be able to please me better.

01:01:20.320 But I'd still be able to have a family and everything like that, right?

01:01:22.720 Totally, yeah.

01:01:23.400 But now, as an adult, I'm like, oh, thank God I'm not bi, because that is a whole area of temptation in my marriage that I don't have. 0.92

01:01:34.520 I never need to worry about being tempted by, like, a guy on a business trip or something like that, and risk getting the diseases that could be associated with that, and risk any relationship complications that could be associated with that.

01:01:45.740 All for no reason.

01:01:47.300 I'm trying to think, like, is the, you know, so we were talking earlier about husbands wouldn't be pissed.

01:01:53.880 If you, you know, would I be pissed if you had an emotional affair with a guy or a sexual affair with a guy?

01:02:02.900 I would be, I would be less concerned.

01:02:07.360 Would you, oh, actually, hear the question.

01:02:09.040 Yeah, I would be less concerned by a bromance, by an emotional affair with a guy, than if you had a.

01:02:13.380 Yeah, yeah, yeah, but just, just biologically speaking, instinctually speaking, would you be more concerned if you heard I had slept with another guy, or more concerned if you heard I slept with another woman?

01:02:24.260 Like, same.

01:02:25.180 Like, that, that's not raising any hackles for me.

01:02:27.680 Okay.

01:02:27.940 I don't know why.

01:02:28.400 Yeah.

01:02:29.640 That's interesting.

01:02:30.280 Well, I mean, it's interesting with a lot of this stuff, you can just search your own feelings.

01:02:32.980 I just think it's, I think, I think bi men are uniquely unusual. 1.00

01:02:36.640 I, I just don't think there are that many.

01:02:39.920 I don't think there are that many either.

01:02:41.000 And in the practice guide to sexuality, one of the biggest mysteries of human sexuality is why is it that gay women, right, look more like straight women, but that have a female preference? 0.67

01:02:55.920 And why is it that gay men, instead of looking like a female sexual expression, have a sexual expression that's more like a mirrored straight sexual expression, i.e. they look like straight men, but that are interested in men. 0.89

01:03:08.220 So I'm going to explain this a little differently here.

01:03:10.680 When we did our studies, what we found is that straight men often find the idea of sex with men, it elicits an active disgust reaction.

01:03:18.580 As we say, disgust is part of the sexual profile of a human.

01:03:21.760 We need to talk about this.

01:03:22.980 It's not just arousal.

01:03:23.760 And for many gay men, sleeping with a woman actually elicits an active disgust response, but in often gay women, you don't get this as much. 0.54

01:03:33.080 They, they don't have as much active disgust towards sleeping with men.

01:03:36.500 They're just disinterested in it.

01:03:38.160 And with straight women, it's the same thing. 1.00

01:03:40.640 So they're both like much closer to the center of, of, of this sort of Kinsey spectrum.

01:03:44.520 And I think that this gives us some idea of what's going on when a person is born gay, that it is not that they are born with the opposite genders, sexual profile, but they are born with a mirrored iteration of their own gender, sexual profile.

01:04:00.300 Which says a lot about how sex might develop in humans.

01:04:03.880 And if you want to know her about this, The Fragment Disguided Sexuality is the book for you.

01:04:08.000 I love you to Desimone.

01:04:09.360 Any final thoughts?

01:04:11.640 Nah, she's peeing through her diaper on my arm right now. 1.00

01:04:15.160 So I gotta, I gotta.

01:04:16.900 You're being a real trad wife here. 1.00

01:04:18.800 Come on.

01:04:20.120 Yeah. 0.98

01:04:20.340 You ain't trad unless you're being peed on. 0.91

01:04:23.220 That's how it works. 0.76

01:04:23.900 Everyone else is all like fancy stuff.

01:04:25.260 And you're like, oh, it's pooping again.

01:04:26.720 It's peeing again.

01:04:29.000 You are delightful, Simone.

01:04:31.080 I am so glad to be married to you.

01:04:32.660 And I'm so glad I genuinely never worry that you're cheating.

01:04:37.820 Like I have no, there is no like doubt in the back of my mind.

01:04:41.260 And it's like, oh, she might be thinking about leaving me or she might be like.

01:04:46.720 Well, I'm so autistic that if I did cheat on you, it would be in my calendar as like a cheat on.

01:04:52.440 You'd be like, hey, Simone, can we talk about this?

01:04:55.100 I see.

01:04:56.400 Well, I mean, with me, I doubt you have any real fear that I would leave you because I was cheating on someone.

01:05:02.020 Well, it's funny.

01:05:02.300 Like I joked about being like, well, you know, if you had an emotional, like if you podcasted with someone else, I'd be devastated.

01:05:08.300 But like, I mean, I actually, I don't, I'm not devastated that you podcasted with Ayla.

01:05:15.440 I love Ayla so freaking much where I'm like, of course you've talked with Ayla.

01:05:18.960 I guess, I guess I see her as a sister though.

01:05:21.400 You know, like she's a member of the family.

01:05:23.020 She's part of House Collins as far as we're concerned.

01:05:24.940 So I also, that's interesting is I wonder if people feel the same way about emotional relationships with people who they see as family.

01:05:35.860 This is the final point I want to make that I call harem sexuality. 0.97

01:05:40.300 I've noticed some women seem to have a sexuality that's really optimized for being in a harem where they want, because many women historically were in harems, especially some of the most successful because those were often well. 0.93

01:05:51.140 So no, no, no, no, then sister wife sexuality. 0.99

01:05:54.260 Well, it's a little different because they're often really interested.

01:05:57.100 Sister wives, my understanding in Mormon cultures, the women didn't have sexual relations with each other, whereas. 1.00

01:06:03.240 In harems they did?

01:06:03.980 Yeah, often they did.

01:06:05.900 And I've met many women that really want to sort of manage a harem for their partner. 1.00

01:06:10.820 Like they like the idea of being dominant to other women, but being submissive to other women. 0.97

01:06:14.800 Oh, that's my nightmare.

01:06:16.860 Like the idea, like when I think about polygamy, I don't think like, oh, how could I share Malcolm?

01:06:26.740 I just think like, I don't want to be around more people.

01:06:30.000 Here's another instinctual thing that I've noticed in you where it comes with, you know, if I was risk of sleeping with somebody other than you, is you seem to have much less instinctual concern.

01:06:42.080 Like Ayla was somebody you mentioned.

01:06:44.080 Now, Ayla is not somebody who I personally find attractive because I find really high body counts, like instinctually unattractive. 1.00

01:06:50.220 But you like wouldn't be as worried with someone like her because I've noticed that you categorize specific women. 0.99

01:06:58.220 If you're like this woman is high status and I get along with her and high resourced in some way, you seem to not like when I say sleeping with a random person, you don't put them in that same category.

01:07:12.840 Yeah, but aren't they my biggest, because if we're talking about risks to relationship integrity in the form of hypergamy, what you're saying is basically any woman who's better than me, I don't seem to be worried about.

01:07:28.700 No, who is, well.

01:07:32.300 I see this letter.

01:07:33.240 She's more famous than me.

01:07:34.580 She's smarter than me.

01:07:35.420 And she's much more pretty than me.

01:07:37.300 I, well, I don't think so, but I can understand how you're framing this.

01:07:41.000 So.

01:07:41.240 I think she's, I think it's, I think our audience can agree too.

01:07:45.220 I don't think she's prettier than you.

01:07:46.940 Well, because you're wearing husband goggles and God bless you for that.

01:07:50.160 It's women you respect in some degree.

01:07:54.020 You don't seem to have the same risk feeling to.

01:07:57.580 And this might be like when you're like, oh, this person's like basically family.

01:08:00.520 What you're basically saying there is.

01:08:02.840 I respect that person.

01:08:04.100 And I suspect that historically, this might be an instinctual thing around how women chose harem partners historically.

01:08:09.480 Is that a respect?

01:08:10.680 Which is that women in harems would likely care if their husband went out and slept with a random person. 0.98

01:08:15.800 But they'd care less if the person rose the status of their family.

01:08:20.100 Yeah, that's interesting.

01:08:21.220 Yeah.

01:08:21.520 And I guess a lot of it also comes down to like personal identity and how you identify yourself.

01:08:25.480 And there are lots of, even like non harem versions where women have chosen.

01:08:30.740 For example, there was that one Mormon wife who chose her husband's next wife. 0.87

01:08:35.720 Oh yeah.

01:08:36.300 Yeah.

01:08:36.480 Yeah.

01:08:36.660 Before, when she died.

01:08:37.940 She had a terminal illness.

01:08:40.040 And she said, she gave him a list of people she was okay with in marrying.

01:08:42.800 Because she believed, and Mormon women believe this, that if their husbands marry two people in their life, even if they're not polygynous in life, they have to be polygynous in the next life. 0.93

01:08:51.520 So when her husband dies, she had to spend eternity with whoever he chose to marry next.

01:08:56.720 Oof, that's terrifying.

01:08:58.220 To not pre-choose.

01:09:00.120 It's weird that it's not more common what she did.

01:09:03.100 But, you know, you'd think that even if you weren't terminally ill, like what if you get killed in a car accident?

01:09:08.320 You just like, if you're going to marry someone.

01:09:10.640 Well, I didn't need to make a vetting video for future wives for me if you die. 1.00

01:09:14.440 Yes, yeah.

01:09:14.700 Where you're like, you know, look, he actually is that good.

01:09:17.200 Like, it's not just an act for the camera, and here are some details that I expect from you.

01:09:24.180 Are you going to do that?

01:09:25.080 You've got to take some time to film one.

01:09:26.460 Yeah, well, I have that.

01:09:27.380 Yeah, I have like a whole set of instructions for you if I die.

01:09:30.460 So I should probably add in something for your future partner.

01:09:35.620 Anyway, we'll love you to Desimone.

01:09:37.160 Love you too, gorgeous.

01:09:37.980 You are a wonderful wife.

01:09:39.500 And have a good day.

01:09:40.720 You too.

01:09:41.980 Bye.

01:09:43.160 Oh, wait.

01:09:43.960 One note I want to make for people here.

01:09:45.460 When we're talking about this, it's important to understand.

01:09:47.620 Like, when we're hypothesizing harems or additional wives or who we're sleeping with, we're not

01:09:52.280 talking about what we think functionally works best in a relationship.

01:09:55.260 We're talking about biological impulses to try to ferret out evolution.

01:09:59.040 Oh, yeah.

01:09:59.280 No, this wasn't a relationship strategy.

01:10:03.320 This was a how do people experience personal emotional reactions to stuff discussion.

01:10:09.300 Yeah.

01:10:09.720 Yeah, sorry.

01:10:10.240 I just need to clarify that for anyone who's confused.

01:10:12.500 All right.

01:10:12.940 Love you to Desimone.

01:10:13.860 Ciao, ciao, ciao.

01:10:14.940 Ciao, ciao.

01:10:15.300 Ciao, ciao, ciao.

01:10:16.620 I just, I realized the other day while I was falling asleep that the way that I view life

01:10:22.820 is kind of like how a ghost would view life, where I have unfinished business on earth,

01:10:28.240 but then once I'm done, I finally get to be released.

01:10:31.620 And that's kind of how people view ghosts, like sort of in Western media.

01:10:34.480 And that's kind of how I love it.

Based Camp - August 21, 2024

The Evolving Science of Why Women Cheat

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript