https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LeLsKhQCi8Y

You could just as easily draw on, I believe it’s Helen Fisher, or other feminist evolutionary biologists who make the case that women are best served by adultery because they’re getting a good range of sperm, and the best suited sperm is the sperm that’s going to win. That does account for cheating behavior, and most of the evolutionary psychologists who have their act together take that into account. The optimal strategy if you’re being cold-hearted about it biologically, especially for a woman who hasn’t optimized her mate choice, might be to find someone stable at second rate and then cheat sporadically to produce that biological diversity. That does seem to be something approximating a stable biological solution, even though I don’t think it’s an optimal one. I think the sophisticated evolutionary psychologists have taken that into account. Gotcha, but let me just speak to why that kind of very beloved, and I have to notice that it’s beloved, of the whole kind of Dawkins crowd, the whole selfish gene crowd, is it kind of loves this idea of the young fertile female who needs to find that unattractive older wealthy man who happens to be a scientist, and also accounts for or always gives males a kind of, well, you’re just polygamous or you just need lots of sexual partners and it’s good for the reproduction of the race of the species. The reason I find these tendentious, and especially this notion of women optimizing the material value of their partner to make up for their reproductive deficits is that, respectfully, it’s out of date. What I mean by that is I totally concede that women, it’s hard to be pregnant, it’s hard to have a baby, it puts you at a disadvantage. Certainly, it’s not accounted for in contemporary work expectations, more so since the pandemic when everyone’s at home, but when you had to go to work, obviously, it’s put women at a disadvantage and they needed a provider for those two years. I will say that now, I think that young men, for instance, like a whole phenomenon that I find fascinating, I might find it fascinating as an older woman who’s married a much younger man, but I find it fascinating that when I was writing the beauty myth, older women were considered done reproductively or sexually. Now, that’s no longer the case. There’s this whole expectation now of young men finding older women who are materially successful and who can provide them with a good lifestyle really attractive. I think that the evolutionary biologists haven’t accounted for that. Even women past reproductive age who are financially successful are considered really attractive to young men now. That’s a 21st century phenomenon. It never used to exist. The other thing that didn’t used to exist is if women have enough material resources now, they can hire someone. I’m not saying this is optimal. It’s very sad. I’m with you on the value of the nuclear family. If they haven’t married someone who can look after them for that brief window when a baby or nursing baby is impeding your ability to go it on your own, totally agree with that, they can hire someone to help with those two years. Really the penalties for being a single mom, it’s not easy. If you don’t have resources, I completely concede you’re going to go down the socioeconomic scale. If you do have resources, that’s no longer the case. That’s why you’re seeing so much of what you criticize. 21st century economic opportunities have made it possible to be an affluent single mom, hire a caregiver, hire someone to help you raise the baby basically when the baby’s tiny. Then starting from three years old, there are childcare centers, daycare centers that will take the baby. I think the evolutionary biologists haven’t accounted for what is going to result from that. It’s what we’ve seen result from it, which is I’m sorry to be rude, but the value of men has gone down. I think that, respectfully, that’s one of the things I think is most useful about your work. Respectfully, I’ve been thinking about this. I think that’s why you’ve been so targeted by the establishment is that you talk about the value of men and you talk about how men can be relevant and consider themselves to be relevant and have a role in 21st century society. I think the great unspoken or under analyzed phenomenon of 21st century is the deconstruction of the value of men, which completely upends the evolutionary biologists’ narrative about men and women. Respectfully, to end on a happy note, I do think the value of your work is that you’re trying to give men and succeeding in a lot of ways a role in 21st century society in which they do have value, but it’s not going to be the same value they had where women could go to love. That’s an interesting subtopic because I’ve insisted to my viewers and listeners who are disproportionately male on the YouTube front, mostly because YouTube is disproportionately male. It’s about 75-25. I don’t differ from that much, by the way. In fact, I think I have more female viewers than average by that baseline standard. I’ve suggested to my young male viewers continually that if they’re rejected by all women out of hand, that they have to take that burden onto themselves and not assume that all the women are wrong and that what they should strive to do. Well, the probability that you’re right and 4 billion people are wrong is one in 4 billion. It’s rather low. You have to take that as a brute fact in some sense. It might be unfair in that women, like men, use a set of criteria that you could describe as arbitrary in some sense to make their judgments, but there’s some things you’re not going to win an argument against and that’s definitely one of them. One of the things I’ve suggested to young men is that if they concentrated on making themselves productive and generous, that the probability that that will increase their ability to find a mate is extraordinarily high. I do think that’s the case and that advantage accrues as men mature. So what do you think of that as a tack? I want to thank you for my marriage because you are my husband’s, he said, tell him he’s my spirit animal. You are one of my husband’s role models and he listened to you and so unlike other men of his generation, he was all about picking up the check and being a provider and it’s really attractive. So 100%, I agree with you. Why was it attractive? Why was it attractive? Well, so now I’m going to throw a little bit of a wrench in your argument. It was attractive to me because everyone likes someone who is competent enough to make money, I guess, at whatever level they’re making money. It shows that they’re not a feckless, immature, dependent person. Everyone likes someone who can look after them, but what I’m going to add there is that I think men like women who can look after them too and I think men like women who are competent too. I think just like it’s sexy when a man picks up a check, it’s sexy when a woman picks up a check in due course. I’ve heard plenty of men say, well, I took her out three or four or five or six times and she never made a gesture to pick up the check and that’s not attractive because women… Well, I think that’s the attractiveness of reciprocity. It’s one of the things you really do want in a partner over the long run and there’s probably nothing more important than this in a business relationship or a friendship or an intimate relationship is that fundamentally the relationship to be self-sustaining has to be reciprocal and that doesn’t mean that everybody gets obsessive about making sure that the distributions are 50-50 because they really should be 75-75. If you’re in a productive relationship, both of you are… What you both receive is more than the sum total of what you both contribute if you optimize the relationship and I think part of the reason that men will appreciate women who pick up a check is not necessarily because it’s an indication of their competence, although I think that’s part of it. I think it is definitely an indication of their willingness and ability to reciprocate, which is fundamentally… Now, I don’t know and I don’t know of any research that pertains specifically to that issue. Right. But I guess what I’m saying to jump in is that I think your analysis and the evolutionary biologist’s analysis is productively updated by this reality, which is fairly new, that both genders are surveilling the landscape for people who are not only sexually and reproductively attractive, but who will reciprocate, who will take care of them, who can provide, who are not dependent. I do think that the kind of woman who was considered very sexy in the 60s when I was a child is no longer considered sexy because she’s not able to contribute to the household. That doll-like, what is her name, twiggy-like, inert, voiceless person. I mean, men who are confident may kind of give it a pass, a passing admiring glance or have a one-night stand with her, but I don’t think that that has a high value any longer as a life partner. Do you think that’s a historical transformation or do you think it’s more a return to something approximating internal norm? Because here’s something interesting, for example, the name Eve, the original Hebrew term for the name Eve, which unfortunately I can’t remember at the moment, means beneficial adversary. Really? So yeah, yes it does, it does. And there’s a notion there that the person who’s the most well-matched to you as a potential partner is not someone who passively submits to your demands, partly because your demands might be unreasonable and pathological and that’s not good for you or them, but someone who’s capable of engaging you in something like a provocative and challenging reciprocal play. If you pick a play partner in a game, one-on-one basketball for example, you’re not going to pick someone that you can easily dominate if you have any sense because it’s not any fun. What you really want is someone who can spar with you at the limit of your ability and that’s a strange way of conceptualizing a relationship, but it’s not strange if you know anything about how people engage in the processes that lead to further learning, for example, or the expansion of skill, is you’re looking for the edge of optimal competition. And I think there were periods of time in the Victorian period in England that you described might have been one of them, where the female ideal is tilted more towards one of passivity and that might have been a reaction, as you pointed out, to the increased agitation on the female front for a broader role in the public polity, but it isn’t obvious to me that historically speaking the feminine ideal has been passive.