The Sexualization of Evil is a Modern Phenomenon... But Why？
Summary
In this episode, we discuss the phenomenon of evil things, or things that were historically evil, being coded as sexy, whether it's vampires, werewolves, or witches. Is this a modern phenomenon, or is it a cultural phenomenon?
Transcript
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The sirens in Greek myths were seen as beautiful, attractive, and evil.
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But the stories were not told in a way that was designed to titillate you and make you desire the sirens.
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It was meant to teach you to be afraid of things that use beauty to attract people.
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Well, I mean, I think they were trying to moralize and show that other people will use, like, seduce you for evil purposes.
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Well, which is just stole your penis while you were asleep or something.
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I thought, like, look, I don't know, it could be a rumor, but some people are saying there's a few women in this town that steal penises.
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I know it's probably not true, but better safe than sorry, right, guys?
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I mean, look, look, look, that old crony panhandler lady, does she really contribute that much to the economy?
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Is it worth risking our penises than this ultra-lefty mindset?
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And they still are more aroused by things that are beautiful.
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Today we are going to discuss an interesting phenomenon, and it is interesting both in how lazily people dismiss it as a phenomenon.
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And in its implications for both our current culture, our evolutionary history, and humanity more broadly.
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Specifically, what I am talking about here is the modern phenomenon of evil things or things that were historically evil being coded as sexy.
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Whether it's vampires or werewolves or witches.
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And the first thing people will say is, of course evil things are sexy.
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It's, we'll get to the forbidden sexy wrongness.
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In most cultures throughout history, even our own, evil wasn't sexy until like the 80s, maybe?
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Like, okay, take something like vampires, right?
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Like, well, not just that, but you look at the revitalization of vampires with Nosferatu, right?
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Like, like that was the popular vampire of, when was Nosferatu popular?
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But also Dracula himself was not attractive for my memory.
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Like in the book, in Bram Stoker's book, and in, of course, the original old movies.
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Was Interview with a Vampire really the first movie to sexualize vampirism?
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Yeah, I think Interview with a Vampire was, well, so keep in mind, Interview with a Vampire was done off of a book that had already become popular that was sexualizing vampires.
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So as much as a culture nerd as I am, I wasn't going to trust my off-the-head memory of was there any mainstream sexually charged vampire movies before Interview with a Vampire?
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So I went to AI to ask, and I got two mainstream sexually charged vampire movies, or this is, I guess it shows how mainstream this was before this.
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This hammer horror film explicitly portrayed lesbian vampires and was quite sexually charged for its time.
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And then the 1972 Blackula, this blaxploitation film, featured a suave, sexually appealing vampire protagonist.
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Man, I specialize in hunting black vampires. I don't know what the PC name for that is.
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And I'm sure you can tell these are not at all cultural phenomenons in the way that Interview with a Vampire was.
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So it does appear that Interview with a Vampire was the cultural inflection point to sexy vampires being a mainstream concept.
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There was a scene, for example, in the original Dracula book by Bram Stoker, in which women vampires in Dracula's castle were like, I don't know, kind of leering at the poor.
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Here is the thing about the Bram Stoker Dracula sexualization of evil, is it was very similar to, like, sirens, historically.
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Sirens and Greek myths were seen as beautiful, attractive, and evil.
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But the stories were not told in a way that was designed to titillate you and make you desire the sirens.
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It was meant to teach you to be afraid of things that use beauty to attract people.
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If you look at modern iterations of this, they are not treated like the sirens of old.
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It is about glorifying the raw sexuality associated with some acts of evil.
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And this is also a really interesting thing of this phenomenon.
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I mentioned this to someone, and they're like, oh, well, you know, Twilight, because this is what they go to in this generation.
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They're like, Twilight, you know, they're not really that evil, right?
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Well, there are the good vampires, and there are the evil vampires.
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The movie that really created this genre, I would say, like, really, really, really, really set it in stone, was...
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I don't know, it was Dusk Till Dawn before this...
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Let's see if you taste as good as your brother.
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And Interview with a Vampire, these guys are unmitigatedly evil.
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There is no genuine redemption of them as any sort of a good thing.
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Outside of, they care for other vampires sometimes, and whiz conditions.
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That is the totality of their plot development as characters, okay?
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And I would note, this is not me shitting on the movie.
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Like, I consider it like a true classic level good.
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And I would note that in this period, you had other iterations of this.
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So, you know, somebody was like, well, you know, again, not evil.
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And I point out something like The Craft, right?
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The Craft was an early movie that really, really glorified the Wiccan movement.
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And the only reason you're in love with her is because she cast a spell on you.
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But also unironically said that the Wiccan movement had an evil component to it.
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The core antagonist of the movie is one of the members.
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Or before The Craft, if you want to talk about, like, people are like, yeah, witches aren't sexy.
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Who said, like, people were trying to sexualize witches?
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Hey, Cupcake, don't I get your phone number, your area code?
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And not in a way where she is like a siren sexualized.
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Where the sexuality is seen as something very...
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And you can contrast that with earlier representation of witches, even in fairly modern periods,
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And there is not a ounce of sexuality in those witches.
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Yeah, first they're Karens and then they're witches.
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Just imagine every parent you ever meet is secretly a witch and stay away from her.
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They might be like, well, that was a children's movie and the protagonists of that were children.
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I don't know if it could have been made today because actually the bigger sexual theme is with the adolescent male protagonist.
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It will raise spirits of the dead when lit by a virgin on Halloween night.
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No, being also super hot for the female, like, of his, like, female co-lead, I guess.
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And then finally, you know, they start their misadventure with his little sister in tow who, to embarrass her older brother,
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points out how his, her older brother comments on her, what did she call them?
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Like, she, she talks about, like, the words that he uses to describe her boobs.
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I couldn't wear anything like that because I don't have any...
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And then she also imitates him masturbating to her in the movie.
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Wait, if you had known that a guy had masturbated to you in high school, like, what would your reaction to that be?
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It's, it's just, it's just, I'm just pointing out how racy that movie was.
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One thing that I want to square with you, though, on this whole, well, witches used to be not sexy, was also still the interplay of evil with sex.
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Now, Dracula wasn't sexy, but he would enter women's rooms at night and suck their blood.
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Witches weren't sexy, but they would steal your penis.
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And historically speaking, you had things like succubi, you had things like incubus, which were, you know, even during the medieval period, these were, if you look at medieval art, they were not supposed to be beautiful, but they used sexuality to seduce men.
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Yeah, I guess, was it, was it just that then they were trying to moralize and show that sexuality is gross and yucky?
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Well, I mean, I think they were trying to moralize and show that other people will use, like, seduce you for evil purposes.
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Well, witches just stole your penis while you were asleep or something. It wasn't like they seduced your penis off.
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Yeah, but if you buy an incubus, it would make you have, like, wet dreams.
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Yeah, but people, there were more, there were more materials about how do we deal with the witch problem and find witches than there were materials about how do we deal with the succulent people.
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I mean, I, I thought, like, look, I don't know, it could be a rumor, but some people are saying there's a few women in this town that steal penises.
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I know it's probably not true, but better safe than sorry, right, guys?
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I mean, look, look, look, that old crony panhandler lady, I, did she really contribute that much to the economy?
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How do you square that close association with evil and sexuality in the past, despite the fact that these people weren't presented as.
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Sirens to sexuality, incubi and succubus to sexuality were purely malevolent and to be avoided.
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And here we need to talk about the misconception.
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You can look at correlations around how banned an activity is to how likely it is to turn somebody on.
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The mistake that people make here is they think about the things that turn them on that they're not allowed to talk about.
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And then they assume banned things, turn them on.
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Like these are things that are banned for good reasons.
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There's no community that these things turn on.
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Or, okay, think about something that's like actively like super shamed.
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Like digging up a dead body and having sex with it.
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Like to you, the average viewer, that is a super banned thing.
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Like has it ever crossed your mind that that would be a hot thing to do despite how banned it is?
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The idea that the level to which something is banned is correlated with how hot it is, is a fiction created by people who are just thinking about what turns them on that they're not allowed to talk about and how banned those things are instead of correlating all banned activities to sexual profiles.
00:18:10.080
The part of it is, is that these things were already tied to sexuality, but they hadn't been morally elevated as an okay to be tied to sexuality yet.
00:18:22.080
Oh, so you think this correlates with societal comfort with sexuality in general?
00:18:27.820
Because that's kind of what happened around this, like starting at the 60s, sexuality became more okay.
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I actually think it's tied to something we have talked about in other episodes, which is the inversion of moral frameworks.
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In the past, if you go to the 80s and 90s, the way the right, which was the dominant cultural force in America at that time, motivated its voters was a disgust-based moral framework.
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Things that disgust you are morally reprehensible and bad.
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We've talked about this a lot in our Disgust to Cringe to Vitalism Framework video.
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I don't need to go further on how this framework died out or anything like that.
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Watch our video on it if that's what you're interested in.
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But the origins of wokeness were brewing in this time period.
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And you see this in movies like Starship Troopers, which we'll talk about.
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One of our best videos ever made is the Starship Troopers video.
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We argued that it's actually the best argument for conservative values ever made, specifically because it was made by a progressive.
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But during this time, progressives reacted to this by saying, well, if they think disgusting is the sign of something's evilness, then I'm going to think disgust is a sign of something's goodness, right?
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And this is why Vanderhoeven, when he was making Starship Troopers, he's like, I assumed everyone would know it was fascist and evil because I chose only attractive actors.
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You thought attractive actors were a sign of obvious evil.
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But in his world, even back then, in this ultra-lefty mindset, ugly meant morally good.
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And they still are more aroused by things that are beautiful.
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At the same time as this inversion began to come about, a secondary inversion began to come about, which is the moral sanctity of a group was not determined by their action or their ideology.
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And we saw this once when people were talking about how they knew that we were bad guys.
00:21:05.780
You must be white supremacists because you name your kids with Roman names, like Octavian.
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And I'm like, the Romans conquered my people, buddy.
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Like, the Romans, I do not consider them a white ethnic group, first of all.
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They were a Mediterranean ethnic group that conquered the Northern European ethnic groups.
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They are, for me, worthy of admiration, even if they conquered my savage ancestors.
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The angle of the arrow wounds show the man is isolated and shot from close range.
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The evidence leaves McKinley with little doubt why the man's life is taken.
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To be buried in that ditch at Stonehenge with the injuries he has suggests we have a sacrificial victim.
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Because of their cultural, technological, philosophical, and literary accomplishments,
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because of their ability to exercise military force on their neighbors in a civilizing way,
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that is something worthy of admiration in my perspective, right?
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When they look for groups to lionize, they will look at, you know, like we had with,
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whatever was her name, like Bambi Slaughter or Savage Bambi or something.
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In the Eurovision, the one who is all like anti-Israel and with a witch and like,
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Do you know, do you know what makes me special?
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And you see this, they genuinely do, in the way that they retell history,
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You know, you look at early American history and you look at all the,
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I will say that it was a very morally complicated time,
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but I think to frame, for example, the settlers as just a morally negative force
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in their interactions with the Native Americans is anti-historic.
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There were good Native American tribes from a modern moral perspective.
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You could say there were peaceful or more peaceful tribes.
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There were more peaceful tribes and then tribes that were dramatically more savage than the colonists.
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It's not talked about how many colonist children were graped and murdered.
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It's not talked about how many of them were skinned because what is scalping other than being skinned alive?
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Yeah, the clamshell thing is what I'm thinking of.
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They took clamshells and nipped off their skin until they died.
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But it was something about clamshells while you're alive and then something else bad happens.
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And it, yeah, I think it mostly involved being skinned alive.
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is that history is morally complex, but generally when I'm looking to the groups I'm lionizing,
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I'm looking to the groups that won in a historic context.
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I'm looking to the groups that produced more philosophical works, that produced more technological
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works, and that ultimately were able to, through multiple measures, have their culture survive.
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And again, these aren't necessarily my ancestors.
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My ancestors were conquered and civilized by the Romans, not the other way around.
00:26:18.980
When I read something, probably the closest ancient work to my ancestors is what's a dumb
00:26:27.200
It is not something that I would lionize at all.
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I'm just looking up how the Powhatan tribe typically use torture in their conflicts.
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But where this gets interesting is in a modern context.
00:26:47.280
So in a modern context, you see something like the lefties supporting Hamas, right?
00:26:54.180
And I literally think that the driver of this support is the group's weakness when contrast
00:27:04.720
Israel's like the most pro-LGBT state in the Middle East.
00:27:08.740
They are the most diverse state in the Middle East in terms of like actual, people can be
00:27:14.500
like, well, you know, there's other diverse states.
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Yeah, there's other diverse states where like the outsiders are basically treated like slaves,
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you know, whether you're talking about like Qatar or the UAE.
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There might be slight differences based on, you know, whether or not you are Jewish or
00:27:30.980
Muslim, but it is nothing compared to the rest of the Middle East.
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This is a beacon of everything the left says that they value.
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And they rise up, the people who are throwing LGBT people off roofs, who say that their plan
00:27:50.220
is to systemically eradicate an entire ethnic group, you know, from the river to the sea.
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And, and by the way, the, the, the Arab version of that phrase is from the river to the sea
00:28:04.840
Well, but with Jewish slaves, let's not forget that necessary amount of the plan.
00:28:09.740
The, the, the original plan was that they would enslave the Jewish people, at least the technically
00:28:14.280
competent ones, and then just kill any of the ones that were involved in the war.
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Of course they would live, you know, they are genuinely monstrous, genuinely monstrous.
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And people can be like, well, the people of Gaza are not Hamas.
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And I'm like, yeah, well, the people of Gaza both voted for Hamas at a higher rate than
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the people of Germany voted for the Nazi party.
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And they support Hamas at a higher rate than the people of Germany supported the Nazi party.
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To that one hapless subscriber of this podcast, who's now become an instant unsubscriber who
00:28:50.640
Right, you know, there was one person that was like, I support Palestine.
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And I was kicked off of Reddit for supporting Palestine.
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And, you know, he's wrong to say that like Kamala Harris is more fascist than Donald Trump.
00:29:04.020
Yeah, but it's this moral inflection that we see on the left, which I find really, really
00:29:17.900
At least it clicks into the broader theory of, oh, everyone, like characters, kids book
00:29:25.460
illustrations, all these people have been made progressively uglier and weaker over time,
00:29:30.740
that that is supposed to be equated with good, that some people even see it as a perversion
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of Christian values, that the meek shall inherit the earth and that, you know, being strong and
00:29:40.920
wealthy is a bad thing, which I don't know, I could see that sort of being how some people
00:29:52.140
It just it fits in very neatly with that philosophy and that to be powerful, to be strong, to be
00:30:00.920
So it would make sense that evil characters are monsters and sexy and that we still want
00:30:11.940
I'm actually going to reframe this for you because I do not think that one, this is definitely
00:30:21.780
It's downstream of a reaction against disgust based morality.
00:30:25.900
But when you well, and the moral system of wokeism, which is to say, all differences between
00:30:35.680
populations are primarily due to discrimination.
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And that being the case, the more a group is out competing other groups, the more evil
00:30:47.460
This is why leftism always ends in anti-Semitism, because Jewish populations for cultural reasons
00:30:54.000
And so it's always going to lead to them denigrating that population, because there is no explanation
00:31:00.900
for group differences other than discrimination or, you know, Asian populations.
00:31:04.420
We did our Asians aren't actually that much smarter video, but Asian teens study on average
00:31:13.020
Yet that cannot be within the urban monocultures explanation or justification for allowing a disproportionately
00:31:20.200
Asian population to get into our university system or to get into positions of power, because
00:31:26.600
there can be no explanation for group differences other than oppression.
00:31:31.420
And when that is discrimination and unfair rigging of the system in one group's favor.
00:31:36.040
And so when that's taken into account, well, now you have this framework where powerful is
00:31:49.680
And God, there was a secondary point I really wanted to make here.
00:31:53.020
How does this relate to vampires, which is everything like that, right?
00:31:58.520
If you as a vampire have to be worried about the public finding out who you are, right?
00:32:04.220
It doesn't matter that you kill innocent people, or it doesn't matter the effects that has
00:32:10.000
It doesn't matter because you are not in control because you are afraid about your identity being
00:32:18.740
All moral acts are excusable and a sign of personal defiance and an honest and good defiance to
00:32:29.060
the extent where I think you see this reflected in Hamas, right?
00:32:37.380
It doesn't matter that you, and by the way, to the progressives who think that story was
00:32:41.300
No, it was the number of babies that were beheaded that was being talked about.
00:32:46.160
There was baby beheading definitely happening because you gang-graped people to death.
00:32:53.580
You know, that doesn't mean anything because you are the weaker one.
00:32:56.720
So you get to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it.
00:33:03.040
And so I think that that is where you get this covered.
00:33:09.800
But I think we want to talk about a secondary thing here, which is really interesting, which
00:33:16.420
is the way that progressive women have begun to relate to dominance due to overly sexualizing
00:33:24.440
We've talked about this in other episodes, but it appears that there would have been two
00:33:27.780
core sexual strategies women could opt into in a historic context.
00:33:31.300
The one is for monogamous relationships, but the other is if you are a sex slave being
00:33:39.920
We see it in both literature sources and from DNA records.
00:33:43.060
And you would likely need to not hate that that's happening to you if you're going to
00:33:47.980
Then how does your body know which situation it's in?
00:33:52.000
And we have mentioned based on Aila's data, we see this in her data as well.
00:33:54.980
The more partners somebody has as a female, the more they're into violence-based sexuality.
00:33:59.980
And so part of what we might be seeing here is a preference for violence-based sexuality
00:34:04.920
due to the promiscuity of the female population.
00:34:08.180
And this is an outlet to engage with morally sanctified violence-based sexuality.
00:34:16.260
But then the second thing is, is I think women don't know how to relate to dominance anymore.
00:34:23.000
If you see moral dominance, i.e. a male who is just a dominant, caring figure who helps
00:34:31.880
you and open doors for you and is there for you, as a sign of some sort of moral failing,
00:34:37.820
So you cannot be aroused by, you know, astronaut Mike Dexter, because he's a bad guy, right?
00:34:48.920
How do you, where bad guy is defined by what I think you and I would call a generically good
00:34:59.220
And they find that in this denigration by these ethereal characters.
00:35:09.080
So evil being sexy is also a product of changing norms around female sexuality, causing women
00:35:22.900
And that promiscuity leads them to be aroused by less friendly, committed partners.
00:35:32.380
Therefore, in media, we're seeing an increase of dark triad traits and evilness being what
00:35:41.820
people are turning to sexually, what women are turning to sexually out of interest.
00:35:45.540
And I guess when it comes to the sexy and evil nexus, it does seem to be more of a male
00:35:53.460
characters thing than a female characters thing.
00:35:56.600
Yeah, you get a few female characters, but it's definitely lower.
00:36:02.220
Actually, I'd say that it's the crazy sexy metric, which is more of what female evil is associated
00:36:10.340
with, the two characters here being Harley before she was made gross and jinx.
00:36:16.800
Catwoman a little bit, too, at least in the Tim Burton version, which is the best and only
00:36:24.560
Sort of busting Batman makes me feel all dirty.
00:36:45.220
Well, that was very brief, just like all the men in my life.
00:36:50.700
The so-called normal guys have always let you down.
00:37:01.860
Definitely top tier cinema, one of the best films ever made.
00:37:05.800
I do think it's one of the best films ever made.
00:37:09.060
Okay, so Tim Burton's Batman and Interview with the Vampire.
00:37:17.060
The young generation needs to learn that there was a time when people made good films.
00:37:24.980
Yeah, that may be a good different episode in terms of quality changing over time.
00:37:30.720
Because I was just thinking about it the other day while cleaning out our attic.
00:37:38.560
But the versions of this that are constructed now that I can buy now are lower quality.
00:37:47.500
When it comes to clothing, even when it comes to media, books, movies, supplies, backpacks,
00:37:53.720
appliances, even cars in some cases, the quality that we're getting...
00:38:01.060
Like, you know, Louis Vuitton used to be something that was consistently very, very high quality.
00:38:06.300
Now, you know, you buy a lot of clothes from couture designers, supposedly.
00:38:12.920
And they will fall apart after the same number of wares that something from Banana Republic or Primark will.
00:38:26.480
And I think that's a broader theme, too, is that it's weird that as culture, per our view, at least, has degraded.
00:38:34.120
Which is not the fault, per se, of progressive values or being left-leaning.
00:38:39.440
It's the fault of a super virus that has taken over that movement and parasitized it.
00:38:45.180
But the degradation of culture has also correlated so highly with the degradation of clothing quality, food quality, in some instances.
00:38:59.480
Media quality, book quality, video game quality, as we discussed in another episode.
00:39:07.080
And I think that this degradation can only be resisted through a, well, certain types of social resets is what we really need to hope for.
00:39:18.560
It's not going to be AI because what people have pointed out with AI, which I think is really astute, is that people expect revolutions to be often in the form of some fundamentally new or different product or service.
00:39:33.600
When sometimes the revolution takes place in something becoming mass-produced and a lot less expensive to the average person.
00:39:43.360
So quality is actually worse on average, but now everyone can access it.
00:39:47.480
Like, I just watched a really interesting YouTube video on how the Bic pen revolutionized literacy.
00:39:54.220
Because for the first time, a non-quill-based pen and an affordable pen became available to the masses.
00:40:03.180
They could actually write more, which is interesting.
00:40:07.040
And I think this is, because it's a much more subtle thing that's happening.
00:40:11.020
Something, you know, becoming affordable and also just not that great.
00:40:13.720
It doesn't seem that impactful, but it's intensely impactful.
00:40:17.800
Think about, like, I think airline flight's similar, right?
00:40:20.520
You know, airline flight used to be, for what you could get at the time, you know, highly luxurious, you know, really, really, quote-unquote, high quality.
00:40:29.400
And now you're kind of in, like, a Greyhound bus in the sky, wedged in with a bunch of people.
00:40:36.340
Maybe fewer than it used to be because it's so expensive.
00:40:41.840
And I wonder, yeah, this seems to be one of those things, but not the only thing.
00:40:46.140
Does any of this connect and correlate to the sexy ex-Halloween costume?
00:40:54.400
Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.
00:41:00.000
The hardcore girls just wear lingerie and some form of animal ears.
00:41:05.760
Unfortunately, no one told me about the slut rule, so I showed up like this.
00:41:15.020
No, I actually think that's a totally different phenomenon.
00:41:17.620
I think that that was just people realized, oh, I can dress whoever I want during Halloween.
00:41:21.940
So I'm going to be sexy, but I have to be scary.
00:41:24.520
No, it was that they realized, I can dress whoever I want during Halloween, even beyond normal sexual amores.
00:41:32.020
I.e. rules that would normally say, you can't wear that at school.
00:41:40.180
So why not cheese how sexy I'm being if those rules around modesty don't apply on this particular day?
00:41:51.460
One thing that I can't square with my past self is why I wore such revealing clothing, despite being so physically self-conscious.
00:42:10.560
Like, miniskirts and thigh-high stockings was, like, one of my go-to staples.
00:42:16.740
From, we'll say, age 15 to 26, like, a little after I met you.
00:42:24.520
I started dressing conservative after I met you.
00:42:27.480
You actually, I seem to remember this a little bit.
00:42:41.840
Like, women don't like a lot of elements in their body.
00:42:47.740
He's going in for the save, ladies and gentlemen.
00:43:02.740
It does not synergize with calculating, calm, cool, reasonable, collective hotness.
00:43:10.260
Yeah, but I was playing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope before I met you.
00:43:21.360
I was like, oh, this girl is desperate to have somebody to work for.
00:43:24.700
That's just because I thought you were amazing.
00:43:31.620
Okay, so you're saying I didn't come off like other days.
00:43:39.340
I was turning people away and trying to get out of all my other dates.
00:43:43.640
And then I met you and was a little too thirsty, apparently.
00:43:46.880
But yeah, it's odd to me that women want, young women want to reveal so much of their bodies when, at least if they're anything like me, or anything like they signal publicly.
00:43:56.680
They're very self-conscious about how I want it to their bodies.
00:43:58.600
Yeah, why did you? I mean, do you remember the decision that went into doing that?
00:44:01.140
Did you think that you would be, that people would respond more positively?
00:44:07.740
And I think people get so confused when they think that women dress and put on makeup for other people.
00:44:18.280
And I saw them on other people, and I thought they looked cute on other people.
00:44:27.540
You wanted to look at yourself in the mirror and be like, ooh, you're so sexy.
00:44:32.760
And you can see this in how many women choose to dress.
00:44:35.780
They see stuff that they think is pretty, and they put it on them.
00:44:39.140
They're not thinking about how they look on it.
00:44:47.760
And like, I want, our daughter Titan does this.
00:44:50.700
She'll find stuff that's pretty, and she'll put it on her.
00:44:53.500
And it's not because she thinks it's going to look good.
00:44:56.240
She's like, oh, like, I will accessorize with this pan on my head.
00:45:02.100
How do you counteract this instinct in young women, culturally speaking?
00:45:08.920
Well, you know, I think young women who grow up on camera and have terrible family influencer
00:45:17.580
parents see themselves so much that I think they realize real quick what they actually
00:45:22.920
I grew up in an age when having images of me was still kind of unusual, so I didn't necessarily
00:45:29.540
And so I think, and especially now, because even just, I take so many pictures of our kids,
00:45:34.440
and we have a family album that plays in our house on our screens.
00:45:37.440
I think our kids just seeing themselves in our family album would be probably enough for
00:45:43.500
them to see whether or not they were pulling off a look.
00:45:45.760
I also think that our family is going to be well known for editorializing on anyone's
00:46:02.120
In fact, I know fewer people who had siblings, like a lot of them, and have terrible fashion
00:46:11.340
Because I think you just get ruthlessly bullied when you look like a doofus, and you have a
00:46:39.100
Thank you for being my wife, and I think we have to go get the kids now.
00:46:48.520
On the subject of super stimuli and social media, and also different things that get
00:46:55.780
to different genders, there is a super stimuli genre on TikTok and other shorts-based platforms
00:47:02.540
that disproportionately seems to attract women.
00:47:05.520
And it is the genre of restock videos that are often marketed as ASMR as well, but they're
00:47:14.160
If you know what a restock video is, I don't know this term.
00:47:19.540
It is, typically you as a viewer are just seeing hands restocking anything.
00:47:24.900
So common restock videos are of refrigerators, freezers, even ice trays.
00:47:33.180
Female hands, always, because this is a female genre.
00:47:38.620
People are restocking their guest bathrooms, their powder rooms, their bathrooms, their
00:47:44.020
And what they're doing is you're just seeing hands, sometimes cleaning out the thing first,
00:47:50.420
And then they are restocking it with brand new products in quick succession, very fast
00:47:55.660
cuts, sometimes tapping on bottles or whatever for the ASMR part.
00:47:59.140
But I'm realizing that it is very much, and because I see even our daughter Titan doing
00:48:03.660
it, and I do it all the time, this, I think that there's a female instinct towards squirreling
00:48:08.940
Like I'm putting my, like my little food stores and my little box and it's safe now and like
00:48:18.160
They get these little fancy jewelry boxes and they put the jewelry in the little box with
00:48:26.240
I'll send you like a, a comp, like a compilation of restock videos.
00:48:30.380
And you'll, you'll see that they've basically on social media, it, there's been this evolution
00:48:36.380
of a super stimuli of this because people have found organically over time that when they
00:48:43.600
take video of themselves restocking people's like women's women's eyes dilate, and they're
00:48:50.700
And there are people who all they do, and they have millions of views is just restock their
00:48:55.980
In fact, fridge restock videos and shorts are so big now that there are even people who
00:49:02.380
are trying to find their niche by doing themed restocks.
00:49:19.440
And theyouts akhir their friends until finances and you got them.
00:49:50.560
So they are afraid to pick up my chest cocky transferred to a stageitSpeck.
00:49:58.040
like wait what yeah like bridgerton themed fridge restock or like everything and it's like
00:50:11.080
wait what what wait what would a bridgerton fridge restock look like it would look like
00:50:16.300
first taking everything out of your fridge and then putting everything back in your fridge
00:50:20.740
but in really girly containers and also putting little like flower like flowers everywhere in
00:50:26.680
your fridge bridgerton like about the past yes bridgerton is a regency era romance fantasy
00:50:32.740
show on netflix little containers they use regency themed containers no it's just there's no logic to
00:50:40.540
this is this is corn as it's women it's women okay if we combine one super stimuli with another which
00:50:49.280
is historical romances that must equal sales but then there's also like summer themed and like when
00:50:55.160
people do ice tray restocks for example they they have purchased tons of different expensive
00:51:00.960
silicone based ice molds and then they've made tons of different themes of ice like this is smoothie
00:51:05.940
ice this is kalua ice this is tiramisu themed cold brew coffee ice cubes you know and then they just
00:51:12.500
put them all into freezer into like and of course most of these things involve buying lots of little
00:51:16.960
plastic trays and you're unloading packaged goods into these little trays in a way that looks really
00:51:21.640
neat and organized you'll see it's a whole genre but i think it's really fascinating as a female
00:51:27.640
super stimuli and it is absolutely the same as like a very very busty woman on porn hub it there's no
00:51:36.940
it is pushing the same kind of button and that there's some deep evolutionary like
00:51:41.920
like this this correlates with my survival and it's fascinating to me this this genre that it even
00:51:50.900
creeps into like my instagram feed and i find myself watching it and thinking oh it's bad it's bad but
00:51:58.540
it's also so good anyway let's let's get to the podcast