Men look for reasons why they wouldn't sleep with a girl, whereas women look for reasons why they would sleep with a man. So the default position for men is, you know, I would sleep with her unless there's some extraordinary reason why I shouldn't. Whereas for women, it's definitely not going to sleep with him unless there's some particular reason why I should. Rob Henderson in the building.
How are you, man? Good Chris, how are you? Yeah, great. Great to have you on here.
Welcome to the UK. You're in lockdown as well, by the way. Yeah, it's great to be here, you know, in the middle of this pandemic. So what are we going to be talking about today?
Yeah, I thought we'd talk about some evolutionary psychology, some social psychology, and what's going on with modern dating, modern in the sense of, you know, the 2020, but also in the sense of what's going to happen with this coronavirus and how that might affect the dating scene too. I can't wait. I love it. So why do we stop?
Yeah, I mean, I suppose we can start with some basic evolutionary psychology. So just right off the top here, I mean, you know, a lot of people have questions about why do we like, what we like, how flexible are our preferences, you know, why does it seem like men seem to be attracted to younger women? Why do women seem to be attracted to exceptionally wealthy men? And of course, there could be some cultural components, but a lot of evolutionary psychology focuses on sort of more innate or more cross-cultural preferences.
And they basically are looking at, you know, what, what is sort of evolutionary advantageous for human beings to pass on their genes? And so evolution operates at the level of the gene. And so sometimes we do things that are advantageous for our genes, but they actually hurt ourselves. Well, like something like, for example, for men, we'll sit with men risk taking.
So on average, women tend to be attracted to men who take risks in intelligent ways. But things like, say, motorcycle riding or bungee jumping or certain kinds of sports, I mean, these are typically more attractive. And they're also extremely risky. And so things like this can attract partners, you know, partners, but they can also put your life in danger.
But that's one of the interesting things about evolutionary psychology. I mean, one of the principles is that, you know, if you have a trait that is reproductively advantageous, but harmful to yourself, that trait will still tend to proliferate. Whereas if you have a trait that is advantageous for survival, but turns off the opposite sex, then that trait will tend to disappear from the population. So say you have some kind of trait that promotes longevity, but I don't know what makes you look unusual in some way, or it just turns the opposite sex off.
And it doesn't matter that it's keeping you alive, if you can't find a partner, that gene is going to, those genes are going to disappear. So something else that's important to know about evolutionary psychology and men and women, is that women take on a much greater burden with child rearing than men do. So if you think about what does a man have to invest to have a child, well, really not much more than a few minutes of activity. And maybe being very generous to a couple of men as well.
Well, yeah, I'm trying to be nice. We've all had a bad night. All right. That's true.
That's true. And there are some. So yeah, exactly. So some men, they invest a few minutes, maybe a few seconds in some cases, whereas for women, they have to invest.
I mean, if women happens to get pregnant and have a child, I mean, that is, you know, nine months of pregnancy followed by, you know, years of having to care of a child and so on. And so in the ancestral environment, women took on a much greater burden. And so women have evolved to be particularly choosy about who they partner with. They tend to be more scrutinizing.
They evaluate men to see whether men is a sort of worthy partner, whereas men tend to be slightly less, you know, scrutinizing and yeah, a little bit more relaxed in terms of who they're willing to have sex with. When it comes to long-term relationships, men do have some rigid standards about who to partner with. But even though today we have birth control, we have all of these reproductive technologies and so on, our brains and our bodies are still sort of stuck in this stone age. You know, humans, there's some debate about this, but humans haven't really changed much in the last 100,000 years or so.
And so some strategies that we enact today, reproductively, are more beneficial for a different environment for the ancestral environment. Yeah, I know a good example of this, I think, is men fighting and the increased chance of men fighting when there's a group. Have you seen this? Oh, yeah, I haven't seen that specifically, but that makes sense.
So if there's men tend to fight, it's a display of dominance. There's an embedded winner and loser behavior mechanism as well, that the loser cowers, it means I am lower that the winner kind of is up and tall, stand up straight with his shoulders back. And apparently, I can't remember where I read it. I'm just swimming in evolutionary psychology at the moment.
So it's like David Busse or Robert Wright or Rob Henderson. And yeah, that's when there's a group of people observing a man's likelihood of fighting, of getting to a physical altercation goes up. And that would make sense in an evolutionary standpoint, right? If you are in a tribe or showing us 50 people in it and everybody knows everything that's happened and there's people watching and you back down from a fight, they might think in future, I can push Rob around, that guy's a pussy.
Whereas if you stand up for yourself, even if you potentially lose, but if you stand up for yourself, people might think, yeah, Rob's worthy of respect. Yeah, yeah, that seems to align with some evolutionary psychology principles. And yeah, when there's a crowd, it would make sense that men are more willing to engage in physical altercation. I've also seen, if you look at that, I think Martin Wilson and Margot Daly, I think the name is right, Wilson and Daly, in any case are the last names.
They looked at young male homicides and the causes of young male homicides in the United States. And what they found is that most homicides started over what they call trivial altercations, essentially minor insults, dissing one another or insulting one another. And these are the most common reason for male homicides because of these trivial altercations, what they discovered. And so interestingly, I just read a blog post about this on Psychology Today by Douglas Kendrick.
And he said that if you're a young man, one of the things you can do to promote your own survival and longevity is to be polite to other young men, simply because disrespecting another young man is actually very dangerous based on some of these findings on what causes men to kill one another, trivial altercations, man. So if you don't knock someone's drink over or cut in line at the supermarket, oh, well, there's not enough people at the supermarket at the moment anyway to allow that is that you've got to keep two-meter distance. So okay, so men and women have different risks associated with having sex. And until recently, we were unable to have any reliable form of protection, despite how accurate and well-timed you think you would draw gamers is the most optimal contraceptive strategy.
Yeah. So what else do we need to know? Yeah, I mean, something else that might be interesting are, you know, so I've read a lot about about men in particular, you know, why we are driven to do the things that we do. And something like weightlifting or playing sports, things like this.
Well, one reason why, for example, men want to weight lift is to build big muscles. And the research does show on research on attraction that women are more attracted to men with big muscles. Muscular men are, they report having more sexual partners relative to less muscular men. Part of this is because building muscles is costly, right?
It's a sort of fitness indicator, not in this, not fitness in the sense of like, you know, sporty or athletic, but fitness in terms of reproductive fitness, Darwinian fitness. If you can build muscles, it indicates a lot of things about you. It indicates that you're able to obtain, you know, calories, the resources necessary to build those muscles. It indicates conscientiousness, which is a personality trait.
Someone who regularly goes to the gym, that person is diligent and hardworking, they have goals and stick to them. And then of course, they confer protective advantages to people who are less likely to mess with a muscular guy, relative to a smaller guy. And so, yeah, you see some of this in the research. Yeah, Muscular men report more sexual sexual partners.
I just want to kind of dig into that for a second here. The fact that women find those traits attractive and a man has those traits suggests that if she was to mate with him, that her children would have those traits, which means that they are more likely to reproduce because other women will find that to be attractive. Yeah, yeah. So this is some call this the sexy sun hypothesis, which is a brilliant name.
Yeah, yeah. So this is, I first talked about this. I think in Matt Ridley's book, The Red Queen, the sexy sun hypothesis is basically this idea that women are attracted to men who are attractive to other women. And the reason is because if they have sons with this man, that their sons will also be attractive to lots of women and thereby pass on those genes.
But yeah, I mean, the basic idea you're describing is that, yeah, when women want men who have certain qualities, because those qualities will tend to pass down to their offspring. But I think it's also important to make clear that these aren't calculated or deliberate strategies that we're enacting. A lot of this is going on under the hood. We're not even aware of why we like what we like or why we do what we do.
We just know that it makes us feel good. So when a woman likes a muscular man, it's not because all of these operations are going on well, if my kids will be muscular. If there's a woman out there who's gone through that discourse that we've just heard in her mind, I want to meet her and to talk to her because she'd be fascinating. Absolutely.
Yeah, you're totally correct. And that was the point I really wanted to try and get out of you. Can you explain how genes and what they do to promote genetic fitness and emotions and feelings and the more conscious side of brain? How those two things interlink, I think, is it Robert Wright that says genes are the preferences and emotions that are executed, something like that?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, genes are basically selected for and basically through evolutionary pressures, shapes or behaviors. And of course, like there are other factors involved, cultural factors, social factors and so on. But a lot of our behaviors are strategies enacted through our genes.
And it's not like we're consciously aware that we're just sort of going through these motions. In the same way that say, when you're eating sugar, you're not going through this calculated process of, well, I'm eating the sugar because it's giving me caloric energy, which I can expand later and so on. The sugar just makes us feel good. And our genes give us this little reward.
Our biology gives us this little being like, OK, you're eating sugar, it makes you feel good because that's advantageous. But things don't make you feel good for no reason. Everything that makes you feel good is something that, at least in the ancestral environment, paid off in an evolutionary sense. So when you see a beautiful woman or you see a particularly athletic man or whatever it happens to be, you feel a little bit good.
You feel some positive response to that. And none of this is deliberate or calculated. It's just sort of built right into us. And it's not anything that we're really thinking about necessarily.
Yeah, for sure. I think this for me is precisely why I've found evolutionary psychology to be so interesting. It's even looking under the hood, it's taking the engine apart and it's looking inside of the engine. It's looking at why do we like the things that we like, why are our preferences the way they are?
And then when you take that, you take the fact that we have these unwritten rules about the way that we operate. And then you apply them to an environment in which they were absolutely not designed to operate, which is where we are now. I guess, what is it? The last 10,000 years, probably, I guess it'd be maybe 5,000 to 10,000 years or so would be beginning, but especially now.
You totally right. Perfect example. I love the idea of guys going to the gym, displaying the fact that they're able to get surplus calories, because surplus calories are something which would have been a rarity. You know, 50,000 years ago, when all of our problems were problems of scarcity, not problems of abundance like now.
And a guy who's able to be big is, oh my god, he must be an unbelievable hunter. He must be very diligent. He must be very conscientious. But people are now able to game that system.
You know, like you're choosing to eat a protein shake and go to the gym and lift some weights and stuff. That's gaming the system. Right. Yeah.
And on that point about going to the gym and building big muscles, so you don't want to touch on earlier about this. A lot of these sort of secondary male characteristics, there's a paper called Beauty and the Beast by this, I think it's an evolutionary psychologist David Puts. And he basically found evidence for the secondary male sexual characteristics evolving, not necessarily only to attract women, but also to signal dominance towards other men to basically intimidate potential sexual partners, sexual rivals. And basically what he found is that, you know, if you show women pictures of, you know, muscular men, for example, and ask how attractive they are, you know, women do have a small preference for muscular men relative to less muscular men.
But if you ask men how intimidating a muscular man looks relative to non-muscular men, men are actually like the effect size for intimidation, men are much more intimidated by that. Other characteristics like beards. So there's a wide debate, you know, online and everywhere else, you know, do women like beards or not? And I see you got a little stubble going on there.
I can't decide. I'm trying to play both camps at the same time, Robert. That's it. Well, unfortunately, we got you could grow it out.
You can shave it, you know, there's no wave options. But for beards, the evidence is totally mixed about what women actually like them or not. Whereas for men, if you ask them how intimidating is this man with a beard versus without, men are very likely to say he's more intimidating with the beard. Almost no man would say clean, she even men is more intimidating than a man with a beard.
That's so interesting. Did you have a look at men with checkered shirts? Yeah, let me take a look at that one. I think about you who tweeted the study and then I tagged a couple of my buddies in it.
Am I right in saying that the most robust characteristic of physical trait for a man to have is muscle size. It was more effective than low voice than beard and then height. Okay. So I saw a study that was a big analysis and there was varying small degrees, little bits here and there with certain women, certain age ranges of what they liked in men, but across the most robust strategy for making a man more attractive to women across age ranges was just put some muscle on.
So yeah, if you listen, if you're listening, you're struggling, you've had a little bit of a dry spell and you think, I don't know whether a girl beard or go with the gym. Go with the gym first. Maybe go with the beard while you're at the gym. Nice.
I like it. Some interaction there. So yeah, and so there was an interesting study related to this where they basically, so a group of researchers took a group of men and had them speak to a camera, just a few minutes recording these short videos of these men and then they showed these videos to different participants. So they showed these videos to first group of women and then they had these women watch these videos and asked them how sexually attractive do you find this man and they rated them on a scale of one to seven and then they showed those same videos to a group of men and asked these men how likely is it that this man this video would win a physical fight with another man again, like scale one to seven, right?
And they tracked the men in those videos 18 months later and basically asked them how many sexual partners they had over those last 18 months and they found that the number of sexual partners they had was associated with how formidable they looked, how tough they looked to men. That was there was a link there, but there was no link between how many partners they had and how attractive they were to women. So it actually looks like how top people look is more predictive of how many partners you'll have than how sort of sexy you look. What you're saying, Rob, is that men are better at picking out men that are going to get laid than women are?
In a way, I don't know if you put it quite that way. Yeah, I know what you mean. Okay, but in terms of looking at how tough a guy looks, yeah. Yes.
So we have different preferences for men and women. We have the ancestral environment, which is where our genes were created. They have these feelings and these emotions that executes what we should be doing, our behaviors and our preferences and things like that. Some of them were either not conscious or partly conscious or kind of completely conscious.
You know when you see a woman or a man who peeks your interest and you go, oh, she's hot. He's hot. Whatever. So what do we move on to next?
What's next? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we can look at, for example, I mean, we can go back to, and this could maybe connect to some of the more modern dating kind of stuff, but again, so men have far smaller investment in sex compared to women. Again, you have this sort of few minutes, two seconds kind of thing.
So it's advantageous actually, evolutionarily for men to seek more variety. They tend to be more interested in novelty. I just listened to his podcast. I think it was Justin Laymiller who's a sex researcher and he reported that basically when women have sexual fantasies, it tends to be the same person throughout the duration of the fantasy, whereas for men, men tend to switch, you know, who they're dancing using about, you know, minute to minute as they're going to fantasy.
As any man or woman who's listening knows is completely impractical and holy would be an operational nightmare. We did real life, you'd be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But yeah, the fantasy men will sort of go through these different scenes, different people and so on, whereas women tend to stick with the same person.
And then you see this sort of in real life too. Well, the thing is though, if you look at number of sexual partners, straight men, straight women tend to report about four to six sexual partners is the media number that men and women report in US at least. Lesbian women are about the same four to six sexual partners, but if you look at gay men, the numbers are something like 16 to 20 sexual partners. And the thing is like, you know, they're basically, I think this is a more sort of representative look at male sexuality in a way.
I think straight men would prefer to have 20 partners versus four partners, but they have different challenges, right? They have to basically convince women to like them and women are choosier in comparison, right? And so, yeah, I mean, and this is something also that's interesting. Women are choosier in a sense, but the psychologist, Deep Stuart Williams, he's got a pretty big Twitter account.
He has called, he sort of described women's sexual strategies as selectively promiscuous. And what that means is that women will, basically, if a man has exceptionally high status, if you're a rock star or, you know, an actor or something like that, you can basically get a lot of female sexual partners. Many women will sort of reduce their standards for emotional commitment or for trust or cooperation or all these kinds of things, giving men has, you know, this extraordinarily high status. So women can be in some cases, sort of the selectively promiscuous as you Stuart Williams puts it.
But in general, in the daily lives, they tend to be quite careful. Yeah. So what I want to kind of touch on here is that we have this evolutionary landscape, which has an asymmetry, no matter what you think men and women aren't the same, at least in this particular domain, I do not want to get into a discussion about that. Men and women are not the same in terms of their investment in how children are born.
And what that means is that women have to be the gatekeepers and men have to be the sexual protagonists. What I think is interesting is that you see these roles play out in cultural means that become caricatures, right? So you know, every man has a woman ever been called a sleaze. You know, like, or a creep.
Like there's no woman who's ever so much the sexual protagonists that a man would call a race, but that's a common put down for men, right? You know, or a fuck boy or what, you know, pick your vernacular, whatever you want to say. You have that, but you're like, hang on a second, that is a modern day interpretation of an ancient system at work, right? Then the fact that, oh, well, he should text first.
Perfect example, like, watch the man text first. Well, probably because you have as a woman, you have more to lose by a sexual encounter, which means that you need to make him jump through more hoops to get to have that sex, because the risk for you traditionally, over the last 200,000 years has been higher. Therefore, you're the gatekeeper. He's the protagonist.
But that is a perfect example of how the modern world of dating, the modern interactions that every man and woman is listening will know reflect that. Right. Right. Yeah.
You can see this. Yeah. Even even in our more in line age, you know, the other day, for example, I was talking to a two woman and she told me that she had a crush with this guy at her work and I asked her, you know, why don't you ask him out then? And she said, oh, I would never ask a guy out.
And I said, but you're like a number of girlfriends that would say exactly the same thing. She said, no matter how much I like a guy, I would never ask him out. And can you imagine a guy saying this? Like, what if a guy friends, you know, he likes someone and you say, ask her out.
And he says, no matter how much I like a woman, I would never ask her out. Does that make sense? That doesn't compute, right? And so yeah, we see these, you know, as you're saying, this sort of protagonist, this sort of gatekeeper, a perfect experiment there to the men, into the women that are listening to the women, how many times have you gone up to a guy and said, Hey, I think you're really hot.
Are you single or whatever? Now you may have gone up to a guy and said, my friend who sat on that table thinks that you're single, but that doesn't count. So don't try and slip it past me. And then on the flip reverse of that for men, how many times has a girl come up to you and said, and said the same thing, like, it is, I can count, you know, I've worked a lot of nights in my life.
And man, I can remember probably most of the times that that's happened is a very exceptionally unique makeup of a girl who is prepared to go and do that. And you go, why? Why is that the case? It could can such a skew in people's behavior simply be socio cultural.
Right? Yeah, yeah. And I'm not aware of any culture or society in which it is the norm for women to ask men out on dates or sort of take the initiative in these courtship rituals. Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right.
And I think it could be even more important, you know, it's just me because sort of transition into into yeah, this sort of modern dating could be more important for women to take this initiative, especially educated women, because among the educated population within the US, and I think within most Western countries now, there are more educated women than there are educated men. And so if you're an educated woman looking for a partner who's also educated, things are actually looking quite tough for them. It's about dating market at the moment. Yeah, it really is.
You know, coronavirus aside, even before all of this, I think yeah, things we're looking actually quite grim if you look at the data for especially educated single women. So there's this great book, just a couple years old from John Burger called Data Monomics. And he basically ran a bunch of analyses looking at basically, you know, how many single men and how many single women are there, how many educated women were educated women, and so on. And what he basically found is that among people with bachelor's degrees or above who are in their 20s and their 30s, sort of young adults, young singles, there are 33% more women than men.
So there are four women who are college educated compared to every three men. And so basically the market is actually looking quite, you know, quite unappealing or sort of not being unappealing, but you know, it's not looking good for women. Whereas for men, it's actually opposites. If you're an educated man, there's actually a surplus of potential partners for you, in part because if you're an educated man, you can date educated women of which there are more educated women than men, but you can also date less educated women, right?
Whereas educated women tend to be more reluctant to date men who are less educated for some of the reasons that we mentioned before, women want men who have certain qualities. Now, there are some cases where women will date men who are less educated than them, but what the research shows is that in those cases, their partners tend to earn more than them. And in fact, women who date men with less education are twice as likely to be married to a man who has higher income than themselves. So you know, if you're an educated man, I'll hope is not lost for you if you want an educated woman, but you just have to earn a lot more money.
You gotta get your craft up. So again, here's another cultural meme. And I can feel the triggering, I can feel it happening, even in myself, right? Like I don't like hearing the fact that women have hypergems dating preferences that they date what is referred to as up and across, right?
They will, it's the same perfect example of this is if there are any tall girls who are listening, you don't tend to want to date a guy that's shorter than you. If you take that as a characteristic across most important elements of dating, you most women on the whole don't want to date a man who earns less than them or who is less educated than them. And if you are less educated, you need to compensate by earning significantly more as the data would suggest. But you know, it's very easy, turn that into a caricature and what's the caricature of that, the gold digger.
That's the modern, that's the fuckboy Tinder generation, WhatsApp world speak. What that is, it's the girl who is purely interested in resource acquisition. And it's, again, it's challenging to, it's challenging to try and get this across without it sounding like a value judgment that either encourages or discourages says it's either good or bad. This isn't, I'm going to try and create some form of disclaimer for Rob as well here.
This isn't safe. Yeah, exactly. This isn't either of us saying that this is good or bad. This is the way that people should or should not behave.
But right, I would challenge anybody that's listening to say that this isn't the way that people behave. We have some pretty robust data and everybody knows, everybody knows the guy who is prepared to sleep with women who are of varying standards. But I don't know many women that are prepared to sleep with men who are of varying standards. Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. Yeah. And yeah, it's important that, you know, the studies that I'm describing and some of these generalizations, these observations, they're descriptions, right? They're not prescriptions.
So these are sort of describing what people do, but it's not saying this is what people should do. Some people sort of make this, it's called the naturalistic fallacy, which is basically that just because something exists in nature, that means that's the way it should be. But clearly, this isn't the case. I mean, coronavirus exists, right?
That arose, that somebody ate a bat or something and now there's this pandemic. Should that be the way it is? Darkness on a nighttime. Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, there are some maybe less savory aspects of human nature, but doesn't mean you shouldn't act it, but we are describing it. I think describing it and talking about it and bringing some of these out into the light can help us, you know, inhibit it or redirect it to something that would align more with our moral commitments and, you know, try to make people happier. So a perfect example of this to before we delve fully into the world of Tinder, a perfect example of this is the modern, the modern setup of monogamy, right? What's your, I'm going to ask you to put your money where your mouth is now having read a fair bit of evolutionary psychology.
What's your feelings on what would have been a typical ancestral setup for relationships? Yeah, so I mean, basically what I've read for, you know, what goes on in hunter-gatherer societies, they were largely monogamous for the most part for multiple reasons. One reason is it was essentially impossible to stockpile resources in hunter-gatherer, forging society. So a man could not accumulate vast amounts of material wealth simply because if you're in a small band or a tribe and you're constantly moving, you know, going where the food is where the water is, you can't cored like lots of material resources and carry it around with you.
That's one reason. And another is that simply, you know, men had to rely on one another and trust one another in war and in hunting. And, you know, men aren't going to go, you know, fight for, you know, someone in their tribe who has all the women, right? Like, why would they do that?
And so basically men had to essentially, I mean, the sounds, you know, maybe it doesn't sound so good, but basically like men had to create a system where the sort of access to sexual partners or whatever was roughly equal in order for the tribe to survive. Now, this doesn't mean that in hunter-gatherer societies, infidelity didn't exist or, you know, make poaching, which is, you know, luring someone else out of a relationship. Like, there's research on modern hunter-gatherer societies. And there is infidelity, there is, you know, cheating, there's, you know, divorce exists in a way where basically, like, you know, people switch partners later on and leave their current partner.
So there's all the things, you know, all these things that are sort of recognizably parts of human nature. But, you know, polygamy and its variations didn't appear to exist until the rise of agriculture. Once people were able to sit in one place and stockpile resources, the invention of money, the ability to have, you know, to command large armies and so on, those things can come into life for the agriculture, but in small bands, they're mostly monogamous, it's not understanding. But, you know, the question, often the question is, you know, are we naturally monogamous?
Are we naturally promiscuous? What are we? And the answer is we're kind of both. There is no, you know, universal template for human beings.
It looks like in terms of stability, monogamy is the best, both, you know, maybe modern society and also in in foraging societies. But, you know, people still do have urges and people want to, you know, have had more than one partner divorces widespread. And so, yeah, we sort of want to, what does it have our cake and eat it to? Yeah, yeah, which is very, you know, that's very human.
Yeah, for sure. Okay, so we're moving into the, we're moving into the modern world, moving into Tinder and modern dating and stuff like that. What you've been thinking about to do with that recently? Yeah, yeah.
Well, one thing that's been on my mind lately, and I talked about this in a recent newsletter is what is coronavirus going to do with, you know, casual sex, which, you know, Tinder and these other apps are associated more with casual sex, other people do meet the partners on them. And, you know, you can't, like, all the bars are shut down, right? Like, you can't go out, you can't go to restaurants, like, you can't meet anyone anywhere. And so that's, you know, one obstacle if you want to meet someone new.
And another is, we don't know who has this virus, man. Like, are you like excited to go meet someone new? If you don't know, like, who has this virus who doesn't, like, who's eager to like have a new sex partner who might have COVID-19? So, yeah, this is something that my impression is that there will be less casual sex at least throughout the course of this epidemic.
And I think people will sort of recommit to whatever relationships they happen to be in for now. After this is all over, I'll be curious to see how it goes. You know, I've heard some stories about, you know, couples who live together are starting to feel, you know, a little bit irritated at their partner because they've been cooped up inside for so long with this sort of social distancing stuff. But yeah, Tinder is very interesting.
You know, speaking of, you know, education and so on, this, there was a study, I think it was this year, I think it was late last year on Tinder. I want to say it was in the Netherlands, where they basically took mail profiles on Tinder, took the same exact man, same profile, and all they did was change his education. So, in one profile, the man had a bachelor's degree and in another profile, the same man, he had a master's degree and found that the man with the master's degree got about twice as many likes compared to the man with the bachelor's degree. So, yeah, you mentioned earlier to your listeners here, you know, hit the gym, but maybe also hit the books.
If you want to get involved. So, there's only so many hours in the day. Well, prioritize one or the other. But yeah, so this is pretty interesting.
Even on Tinder, you see these sorts of, you know, these sorts of mating strategies emerge in terms of status, education, and all these kinds of signals. And, you know, relatedly, you know, given that the economy seems to be taking right now, this could be bad news for some men, maybe good news for others. But basically, what the research shows, this rise in sexy selfies, right? So, this research, basically, that was done on sexy selfies and what they found was that basically, so they had a question, you know, why are women taking sexy photos of themselves in this way?
How would they define sexy photo? I'm not exactly sure, but, you know, sort of provocative, maybe, you know, not wearing much, something like that. I don't know if they have photos or well-posed photos and stuff like that. Right, so beach photos is kind of thing.
And so, the researchers asked, well, are women doing this because, like, are the societies women doing this in more misogynistic, maybe societies that are more likely to objectify women or view them as sex, you know, just because of their sexuality or something like that, or could it be something else? And so, they basically like collected data from all these different countries, different regions within countries, and they found that, you know, the misogyny of a country had nothing to do with how many sexy selfies women were posting, but what sexy selfies were associated with was economic inequality within developed countries. So, for example, within the US, in regions like New York City or Miami, San Francisco, places where there's a bigger gap in income between men, you're going to find a proliferation of more female sexy selfies, and the researchers posit that the reason for this could be that, you know, if there is a small number of men who have a lot of economic resources, women are basically competing and sort of advertising themselves to these men. They have to open that game.
Basically, they're upping their game in regions where, yeah, basically there's a lot of halves and, or rather few halves and a lot of half knots. And, yeah, I mean, there's also interesting research from the 2008 economic recession on purchasing habits of women. And what they found was that, shortly after the 2008 economic recession, sales of cosmetics increased. And again, the researchers there posited that, you know, in an economic downturn where women are again sort of upping their game trying to find the relatively fewer men who are economically successful in those situations.
I feel like we're sort of like talking about women and, you know, like you mentioned, gold fingers are there. I want to get, you know, sort of just, you write this disclaimer here that, you know, women are gold fingers or anything, but that they are enacting a strategy that paid off for their ancestors, right? Don't care about your feelings, Robert, unfortunately, and the guy from DataNomics another first time. Well, why don't we flip it on its head?
Why don't we start talking about the gender sex gap between men and women? So I know that I think it's the bottom 80% of men on Tinder are competing for the bottom 20% of women. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. That was a fascinating finding.
Yeah, where they basically found exactly what you're describing here, that, you know, men who are not, you know, exceptionally good looking or have certain status markers, they're having a much harder time on Tinder. Just to put this into perspective, if I recall these numbers correctly, men on average, swipe 60% of the female profiles they see they like them. Was it swipe swipe right? You know, they like those profiles.
Don't pretend you don't know, Robert. I know. Let me pull it my app real quick. And then whereas women on the other hand, I think it was 4%, they swipe right on 4% of the male profiles they see.
That is an unbelievably low number. I mean, just purely from a time investment standpoint, you're going to get through 100 people to get four right swipes. And if you have a particularly bad afternoon, it's not a ridiculous that to think you might not strike swipe right on anyone. Unbelievable.
It's almost like the experiences are completely different, right? Whereas, I mean, like, this wasn't a psychologist. I just, in a casual conversation, I once heard someone describe this, the sort of difference between men and women in terms of, you know, how they value the opposite. It's something like men look for reasons why they wouldn't sleep with a girl, whereas women look for reasons why they would sleep with a man.
So the default position for man is, you know, I would sleep with her unless there's some extraordinary reason why I shouldn't. Whereas for women, it's definitely not going to sleep with him unless there's some particular reason why I should. And this is sort of, you know, we're seeing this in on Tinder, right, with the frequency of rights wipes. So, yeah, so basically there's a large group of men who are collecting large numbers of likes.
I have a friend, you probably know guys like this, who are racking up huge, huge numbers on these dating apps. Yeah, I have a friend who has something like 20,000 plus matches on Tinder. I think he closed it down. He ended up getting a relationship and he settled down.
But for a while, I'm surprised he didn't break the fucking service. He closed it down because Tinder came in and they said, I'm sorry, we just can't give this account anymore. Storage space with your 20,000 likes. Yeah, shut it all down.
That was actually opposite. I don't know how this happened, but he was a Tinder identified him as like some kind of valuable user. And like, if I'm all of these perks and benefits and like lifted his limitations on how many points he can take. Amazon Prime or something.
If you've ever actually spent more than a thousand pounds in a year on booking.com, you get to become a genius. And booking.com genius is fantastic. You get 10% off, you get early check in. So I wonder if he got early check in and then.
Yeah, essentially the equivalent of that. No, I've never gotten those privileges. Sometimes Amazon sends me complimentary protein bars. Nice.
Because I ordered so many of them, but I've never never anything like free Amazon Prime. But yeah, so you got guys like my friend here who has all these likes. And then you have other guys, and I think this is probably more typical of the male experience on dating apps where they go through dozens or hundreds of profiles and get media handful. Of of matches with women.
And so yeah, this is this is sort of the typical male experience where the competition isn't this tough. And one thing I'm concerned about now with the economic downturn is that it could get tougher. As women. Or guys losing their jobs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And full of guys, maybe you know, guys who've been working from home, you know, podcasters and so on, who have stayed at home gigs. You know, things might turn out pretty good for them, but for other guys. Hoping Rob, he is hoping me.
I'm fucking just been praying for a pandemic to happen. So that dating situation can improve. Not man, it's again, this is a tough pill for men to swallow. And you know, when we talk about a world which I absolutely haven't delved into, but in cells, MIG-TOW, which is men going their own way, red pill, black pill movement, roller-to-mass, he's going to come on at some point when I can find out a hold of him.
You know, all of this kind of like men going their own way thing, I think is in response to the challenges that men are seeing in the dating market. It's increasingly hard for men to find women. The stats don't lie. I can't remember how big the sample size was for Tinder, but it was, I remember that they analyzed a lot the difference between how many men that's 80, 20, which is so funny that the pre-distribution as well, the 80, 20 distribution between the bottom 80% of men competing for the bottom 20% of women, which conversely means that the top 80% of men, of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
Like it's such that top 20% of men have such an unfair advantage. And I got, I got a comment, an unbelievably long comment that was very well, very well written, I didn't understand most of the language and it's someone who had crawled out from these Reddit sub threads about MIGTOW and cells and stuff like that. And had said about, he was making a comment on a girl that I had on recently who created a website like OnlyFans long story short. He said one of the things he accused me of playing the game because I'm 32 and still single.
He said that if I was, if I was being charitable slash respectful, generally for men as a whole, I wouldn't continue staying single until 32. The implication is that I'm playing the game, that I'm tying up the options of a number of different girls throughout, throughout their 20s, throughout their 20s, throughout their 20s, which is restricting men from, I mean, first off, I was very flattered. But yeah, yeah, I was about to say. Secondly, the fact it was so well written, man, like it was, this comment was, he had line breaks and he'd managed to make shit bold on YouTube.
I didn't even know you could do that. So I'm like, this is this guy's this a fucking small thesis. You should submit it, Cambridge. And um, he went through and then I replied, I reckon if this tiny little reply, and then he went again, and it was a little bit of sort of vitriol in it.
But what made me really sit back was that it was very well balanced and word in the obviously understood what you're talking about. And I was like, there is an entire body of knowledge here trying to figure out why men aren't getting laid. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Um, I think that, I mean, that that definitely sort of is, at least to me, a very charitable, uh, probably one of the more charitable interpretations I've seen. It's a backhand way of doing it. Yeah.
Right. But yeah, I mean, there are a lot of guys that are struggling. I know guys like this, um, who aren't doing so well, um, in terms of dating, in terms of jobs, you know, they're not where they want to be. And yeah, they're struggling.
And, you know, I don't think guys like you are any like tying, tying women up or anything like that, you know, in terms of keeping them out of out of the dating pool. But I do think there are some challenges right now, simply because the modern world is, you know, there's a mismatch between our sort of innate desires and the way that the modern world is set up. Um, such that, you know, there aren't as many men in college and women tend to prefer educated men, but, you know, men aren't going to college and, you know, people are wondering why that is. There aren't as many, you know, men who are earning, uh, in terms of the millennial generation, I believe that women are earning as much and in some cases, even more than millennial men, um, at least in the UK, I read this.
So you got better educated, richer women. Yes. Women are better educated than richer, which again is, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. But if they're looking for male partners, they're going to look for men who are also better educated and richer and preferably even more educated and richer than themselves.
So this is now becoming the tall friend, right? They're becoming the tall friend who can only date basketball players and, you know, like pro sports guys because, and, and the, the converse of that is really, really bad for both men and women, which is the alternative, if women tend to date up and across or their preference is to date up and across to richer and or better educated men, and there are a few of those men around, there's two choices left, which is both genders get to remain single for the rest of their life or women get into relationships with men that they're fundamentally unattracted to, which is also not ideal. Right. I mean, what is also the other option would be, uh, women can part women can essentially share a man, right?
Um, so, so some people have speculated that this is what's basically going on in these gender imbalanced, um, communities like universities, uh, in colleges where there's a surplus of women relative to men, men are much more likely to play the field, so to speak, you know, they're more, more reluctant to settle down, more interested in casual sex and so on. And in colleges where there are more men than women, there's actually more relationships, more emotional commitment and more to dating culture. Um, and some people find this surprising, but it's really not because in these colleges with more men, they're men are basically competing to, to, to, uh, you know, get a girlfriend and women on average tend to prefer, you know, courtship, commitment, relationships and so on. And in environments where there are more women than men, uh, women, basically have to compete for the small pool of men and what do men like?
Well, men on average tend to like, um, you know, more casual situations, you know, more short term relationships when I stands, um, you know, things that are more casual. And so women are more likely to do those things to try to get men to, to like them. So they've got to play each other's game, right? Right.
When men are the surplus rather than the scarcity, they have to play women's game and when women are the surplus rather than the scarcity, they have to play men's game. Right. Yeah. And we're seeing, uh, we're seeing a kind of inversion.
I mean, I think in the past when men have more education than women, um, maybe was maybe, maybe monogamy was easier, uh, in some ways, simply because, you know, if men, or if, yeah, if women prefer dating men who are educated and have higher earnings and so on relative to themselves, then yeah, I think maybe it was easier back then, uh, in some ways and today when things are sort of flipped and they're the reverse now where women have more education and so on than men, uh, becomes harder. And so some people have suggested that polygamy or some variation of that will arise. Um, there's a lot of ways to become the high sex act. A lot to overcome there.
And I think the whole, we haven't really delved into it too much. That is a whole another two hour episode. I think if we try and really get into how does monogamy, uh, help with resource distribution, but from men to women, et cetera, et cetera. Um, yeah, I wonder, I wonder what an increase in, um, sexual liberation for women in, uh, education for women in, you know, we're talking now we're using terms, speaking about the fact that women are potentially too educated to date men or at least a dead, men that they are attracted to that they're potentially, um, almost shooting themselves in the foot by their earnings and by their level of education.
Um, because they're reducing their own dating pool down. And I wonder as we go through potentially more, uh, gender pay, uh, changing, and I don't know what the immediate future has in store. I mean, the immediate future has absolutely f**k all in stock because everyone's off to the house. But the after that, once the world re begins.
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, in the shorter term, I'm more pessimistic. Um, I think like basically no one has the answer right now and we're going to sort of fumble the model our way through trying to figure out, you know, what to do, you know, in some ways. And, you know, I've written about this, you know, a lot of men are simply just dropping out like, you know, you mentioned the, the, the, make toe guys, make toe guys, you know, a lot of guys now, more and more it seems are just not interested in relationships at all. And they're sort of retreating into, you know, video games or porn or these other, you know, sort of distractions.
And I wonder if as technology improves, you know, once like, you know, there's virtual reality where a man can put on a set of goggles or something and lose himself in some, you know, uh, fictional porn world, um, whether, you know, some small percentage of guys will just be okay with that. So increasingly bigger percentage of guys potentially. Yeah. And in that case, um, yeah, in the real world, uh, basically there will be even fewer, uh, men for women, you know, as, men can drop out and then, you know, there could be some, some sort of, uh, equilibrium reach where, yeah, maybe pull, like some things of polygamy and, and Reaper, uh, technology and so on will, you know, will have a new norm arise.
I was talking to Douglas Murray, guy that wrote Manus of Crowds, I had him on the podcast and he's unbelievable guy. I don't know whether you've seen either, but he's got jacked. He's got a jacked out of nowhere. I just saw him a couple weeks ago and he had, you know, his blazer on in his shirt and everything.
I had no idea that was underneath all of it. Anyone, anyone that's listening that remembers my episode with Douglas, I mean, he'd had a couple of wines. So he's fairly lucid anyway, but he just looked like normal dude, normal guy, but he has been pounding the gym, going his, going his, to search Douglas Murray, going his, to have a look. The guy's jacked out of his mind.
Um, but anyway, so I'm stuck to him. And, uh, he, he, in his book, Manus of Crowds, he got this chapter about women. And he talks about, he's, um, significantly less diplomatic than me and you have been this evening. Um, but he's, he's talking to one of his friends and his friend, uh, said, he was saying, how's your young son who's 17 or 18 or something like that?
Um, is he, is he dating anyone? And, um, his friend replied and said, oh no, he's not interested in girls. And obviously Douglas is a gay man immediately. Oh my God.
He's not fucking gay. Is he like just having seen like the potential future that this, this, uh, fellow headroom. Oh, right. And he said, uh, oh no, no, no, he's, he's not gay.
He's just kind of thinks that women are a little bit difficult to get his head around. So he's kind of just exited that situation. I can't remember what he said. He was doing like, um, working a lot on his career and maybe doing music or playing video games or something.
But you kind of imagine that, you know, if you are the bottom 80% of men who are disenfranchised from the dating market, who essentially can only get yourself into a relationship where your partner low key is unattracted to you, even if they don't know it. Um, and you feel like you're the worst of a bad bunch. I mean, sorry for red pilling you this evening about it, but I'm single as fuck's, I can say what I want. Uh, but you know, if that's what happens, like there's the potential for a whole fucking disenfranchised male militia of single guys walking around.
And I think that, you know, as much as they're very, very well spoken and have some incredibly, uh, sophisticated arguments, there is a significant portion of the MGTOW red pill in cell Reddit movement for whom this is probably the easiest explanation. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I think I think so. And there are, there are more and more guys I've noticed who either, yeah, I mean, to me, that mindset of this, this 17 year old kid is unimaginable. You know, when I was 17, when my friends were 17, like, you know, girls were all we could pop up, that's all we could think about it.
Right. It was like sports and girls. And that's about it. And yeah, I'm seeing more young guys just sort of like either, either say they're not worth it or say that they can't figure it out or they don't really know.
And just general confusion. And, you know, one of the things I think is important, you know, having conversations like this, because when guys go online, um, you know, there's some very toxic parts of the internet, right? Where guys go like, you know, you were talking about characters earlier, they, you know, sort of take, you know, principles and evolutionary psychology or in research and then they exaggerate them or the, you know, sort of turn them into the worst possible version of what the finding was in order to, you know, assuage their own feeling about why they can't get a girlfriend or something like that. And yeah, I mean, I have some sympathy for these guys too.
But I mean, I think that there's a lot of this sort of red pill, miktoe stuff is, is really just sort of, you know, they want girlfriends, right? And this is what's what it turns into. Less time. Like your, your misses would not let you spend five hours a day on Reddit.
So the presumption is that if you're on Reddit five hours a day, you haven't got a bird. Yeah. So but the alternative is unless girls are going gay, and I haven't got, I don't know the stats about that, but unless girls are going gay, they're not dating either. You know, if men aren't dating women, women aren't dating men.
That's not necessarily true. So women can date a man who is dating multiple women, right? So, you know, I think this is probably what this, uh, YouTube commenter guy you mentioned earlier was, you know, when he said you're here, you're talking about these women. So you as a 32 year old, you know, good looking guy, you probably have, you know, six or seven girls on the side.
No, no, no, sorry. No, right. Stop. Stop.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Yeah.
Yeah. And so, and so I think this is, this could be going on here. You know, I have, I have friends who have speculated this. I don't actually know any research, but I have friends who speculate, you know, a lot of guys, they know have, you know, four or five, six girls through Tinder that they're sort of shuffling through.
There was that big piece of identity fair a couple of years ago where they interviewed all these guys and they're like, you know, I, you know, whatever, I, I racked up 40 girls this year or whatever it is. And, um, and so yeah, I think a lot of women are, you know, sort of dating or hooking up with, uh, guys who are seeing multiple women on the side. And then there's a lot of men out there who really aren't seeing anyone. And that gets us through the casual stage of relationships, but it doesn't get us for long term partners.
And say, oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think is happening there?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure what's going to happen there.
Um, currently, I mean, it looks like, I mean, relationships are still forwarding, but at a lower rate, right? Marriage rates are declining. Um, um, divorce rates are increasing. Well, my understanding is divorce rates are mostly stabilized, but, but, uh, marriage rates have declined.
And people are getting married at older and older ages to, um, this way. Hope yet, mom. Yeah. Yeah.
So yeah, long term relationships, um, you know, they'll, they'll probably survive. I mean, we've, we've gone, I mean, as humans, right? Um, we're very, very adaptable, flexible. So, yeah.
That's one of the, um, one of the most interesting things from reading evolutionary psychology that just how adaptable humans are, just how they're able to take, you know, we, the fact that we're able to step into our country's process, you know, even the fact like this whole conversation here, why do we think this? Why do we have this preference? Why do women like this? Well, men like that.
Why is there this disparity between us and the other? The fact that we're consciously able to step in and look at our own programming means that we're able to transcend it. The problem is that you can't get rid of the preferences. Like, evolution is a slow process.
And especially when you have a, um, an environment like the Monworld, which is changing so fast, evolution is pointless at the moment. Anyway, what are you evolving to adapt to? But by the time that you have your kids, the situation that they've got the genes to be adapted to has gone. Yeah.
Being unbelievable at writing on a typewriter because now there's a laptop. It's pointless at being able to be fantastic at, um, flying a plane because now there's surface to wear missiles and it's the engineers that are taking up, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And, and yeah, one of the things that sort of tragic and perhaps one reason I think why, you know, people are so afraid of getting old, there was this piece in the Wall Street Journal recently, how old people now don't want to be called senior citizens, you know, sort of baby boomers. They'd rather be called, you know, something else. They're trying to find a different label for themselves because they're terrified of being associated with that label senior citizen.
Because they knew what a senior citizen was when they were not a senior citizen. Exactly. And people are terrified of aging. And the thing is like in more traditional society, foraging societies, a lot of status was conferred on on old people, right?
Well, one reason was because if you could make it to that age, you know, you're robust, you know, in that environment, you can look to 60 or 70. And then another reason is because you've accumulated all this knowledge that that will help the tribe survive. Whereas today it's the exact opposite. It's the 20 year olds who know sort of the most about, you know, societal trends and, you know, sort of what people are thinking and feeling and where the direction of things are going.
And older people are sort of out of the loop. And I think there's there's something's out about that, you know, that things have flipped as much where we've created a society, somehow we're young people have more status than old people in some ways. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more, especially when one of the things that you were able to accrue as you get older is wisdom. And now with the advent of free information, free global information at the touch of a button, there are no longer gatekeepers to that wisdom.
There is more information on the internet than your granddad will ever know. And with that in mind, it becomes a lot less about life experience and much more about kind of very brute force learning and skill acquisition abilities. You know, if you can learn something fast, if you're able to do rope recall like very effectively or whatever you pick, pick your skill about learning, right? If you're able to do that, you're so much quicker ahead.
If you can learn in two in two years, what takes them? When else 20, it doesn't matter how old they are. It literally doesn't matter how old they are. So yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating times at the moment.
I feel like we've only just scratched the surface as well, Rob. I would love to get you back on if you'd be so kind. I mean, we've got, you know, I know that you've got fuck all else to do at the moment because you're not. I'm quarantined, man.
Please, the love of God, just podcast me again. I need that connection. Yeah, I know. Look, there will be so many questions and comments and feedback.
If you've got anything that you've been interested in throughout this conversation, where should they go on Twitter to? How's it? Yeah, you can just follow me at Rob K Henderson to R.O.B K Henderson. Sweet.
Yeah, I'd love to hear everybody's feedback about this. I want to know if you're a girl who's the protagonist in dating or if you've got a sister that does it or if you're a guy who's finding the easy on Tinder or hard on Tinder or whatever, you know, this is very much an emerging field. And if you can help to shine a light for me and Rob, then that'll make us better educated as well. I also have to give a massive shout out Rob to your mailing list.
I think it's fantastic. I'm subscribed to, I think it's a five mailing list total in yours is one of them. So the link to that will be in the show notes below as well. Link to Rob's Twitter.
Dude, I hope that you enjoy. Oh, let's finish up sex toy sales. Okay, yeah, we can get into sex toy sales. Tell me about sex toy sales.
Yeah, so basically, since, since the spread of this pandemic, the coronavirus thing, sex toy sales have increased. Yeah, multiple countries are the increasing 71% in Italy. Yeah, they increased in Canada. They do not give a fuck, do they?
Yeah, I think, yeah, people sort of know, especially single people, they know that they're going to be locked down for a while and you're not going to be able to jump on Twitter and scratch that itch. So it's time to order some, you know, 70% increase. Yeah. So so they're probably, yeah, besides like Zoom, you know, I think sex toy companies are also making a lot of money right now.
You know, that's the mark. No one's talking about that noise. Everyone's talking about the stock market crashing, but no one's talking about the price of Silicon. The price of Silicon's going through the roof.
Latex cat suits. Yeah. Yeah. Look, Rob, I'm going to hustle you.
I'm going to bring you back on my this is absolutely amazing. Links to everything we've spoken about mailing list, Rob's Twitter, all the rest of it. You know what to do? Like, share and subscribe.
If you're new here, hit the subscribe button, you get an episode every Monday and every Thursday with the most interesting humans on the planet. Like the wonderful Rob. Well, for now, thanks, man. All right, thanks, Chris.