Transcript
00:00:00I've got a question that I've never been able to work out. Why do you think women's sexual desire
00:00:04declines faster than men's in relationships? I genuinely don't know. I tweeted it as a
00:00:11question. I'm hoping that maybe Steve or Rob here have better answers. I genuinely don't know either.
00:00:16Bro, if I'm three for three here, this is fucking money. I mean, would it not make sense that women
00:00:23at the peak of fertility would have the strongest desire for sex? I mean,
00:00:29but this isn't this isn't this. So that effect exists as well. Yeah. But this effect is even more
00:00:33peculiar where if they remate again later, the sex drive goes up again. It's just that it's like,
00:00:41oh, the first year or two sort of a mate retention strategy, right? You're in a new relationship.
00:00:46You would want to sort of boost your sexual, uh, uh, you know, whatever libido to get them on the hook
00:00:54to say, if you mate with me, there'll be sex all the time. But once you have a guy locked in and you've
00:00:58been married for 20 years and you're no longer fertile and you know, the, the, the, the risks
00:01:03to you are very low if you're, you know, and yeah, I wish it was 20 years. The decline is the decline.
00:01:07It was precipitous within the first year. I think it drops by half and then it drops again. And then
00:01:13it drops again. But I talked about this earlier on your risks of pregnancy are much higher the older
00:01:18you get too. Yeah. There's not a big cost for men. So maybe looking at the women's side of it is the
00:01:22wrong. Maybe it's just doesn't decline for men because it's not such a big cost for men. Maybe sex starts as a
00:01:27bargaining strategy, but then, sorry, a retention strategy, but then becomes a bargaining chip later.
00:01:33I don't know if that's too, I don't know if that's too out there, but maybe the, maybe the
00:01:37strategic function of non-conceptive sex, because there's two types of sex, right? There's
00:01:41concept of sex and non-conceptive sex and humans are weird that we do both. Um, and this non-conceptive
00:01:47sex, I could see it having this retention function early, but then once you're in the relationship,
00:01:52it's like, well, what am I doing with this? And maybe it's, maybe it's a bargaining chip.
00:01:55I remember that study that you tweeted, which was, uh, women say that inside of relationships,
00:02:01they have around about the, the amount of sex that they want and men self-report that they would
00:02:06like to have about twice as much sex as they are, which suggests that the couple zero in on the
00:02:12preferred level of sex that the woman wants and that the man is making a compromise.
00:02:16Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was, uh, that was from Roy Baumeister, uh, if I'm not mistaken. And yeah,
00:02:22I mean, I think he does, he does, um, offer this as a, as an idea that, um, the, the, you know,
00:02:29that sex can be a bargaining chip and that kind of, as you, as the relationship prolongs and endures
00:02:33and so on, that, uh, you know, sex is essentially used initially. The reason why it's so high is to lock
00:02:38the male partner in and to, you know, to, to, to, to, you know, get the commitment. And then,
00:02:44you know, once, once he's, uh, he's committed, then you don't have to have as much sex. You know,
00:02:48thinking about sort of the costs and benefits of sex in general, and you know, the, the costs are
00:02:53relatively low when you're in your twenties and early thirties, but then as you age, uh, pregnancy,
00:02:58you know, gets higher and then you hit menopause. And if you can, presumably these studies have
00:03:02controlled for age though. Yeah. Again, there is, the age effect is real. Um, there's actually some
00:03:07new data on that, which is not, uh, which is kind of, kind of weird actually, but we can talk about
00:03:14that separately. Um, but yeah, no, it's a, it's a, it's a within a relationship time span effect and
00:03:19it's surprisingly quick. So it wouldn't necessarily just be like fertility decline. It seems to be like
00:03:24genuine, um, design. Maybe it's just non, maybe there's not much evolutionary storytelling to be
00:03:30told here. It's like boredom, but I don't know what's the, what are we talking like, like
00:03:33apps in absolute terms? Like how much does it actually decline? Absolutely.
00:03:36It'll be on my Twitter. If you want to pull up the graph too, it's going to be hard to find
00:03:39because like relative to men, it totally makes sense that men are always going to have a stronger
00:03:43sex drive, like in relationship, single, whatever the situation is. Men are just because you know,
00:03:48like an average air management perspective, um, it's better for men to just sort of be ready to go
00:03:53at any time. But for women, I'm just wondering like how much of, uh, the decline, uh,
00:03:58occurs from time one to time two to time three and so on.
00:04:00Yeah. Not, not sure. Um, can I just add, you know, the idea of, uh, women using sex to get
00:04:05guys into relationships. I think it's a bit more symmetrical than that. I think that, um,
00:04:08sex bonds, both parties to both partners to each other.
00:04:12Mm-hmm. The, the king of sex differences telling us, I don't think there's a sex
00:04:16difference there, which is kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah. There's always gotta be one.
00:04:18I wanted to ask something, um, and then you can tell me if this is taking us too far afield here.
00:04:23Um, on our earlier discussion, something occurred to me, which is, you know, like what's the question
00:04:28we're interested in, uh, like regarding sex differences? Is it, um, you know, how interesting
00:04:34that men are different now than they were decades ago? Or how interesting is it that sex differences
00:04:39are larger in this context, but smaller in that one? Or are we interested in, um, you know,
00:04:44what's like the true sex difference? You know, you strip away everything. And like,
00:04:48once you really drill down, here's what it is. And I remember I had this conversation, um, I think I was
00:04:52in college, uh, working as an RA years ago. And, um, you know, we were reading about weird societies,
00:04:59Western educated, industrialized, rich democracies. And, you know, there was this thing going on both of
00:05:04you, you know, all of you are aware of this of like, oh, we can't really learn anything about,
00:05:08I mean, I'm simplifying some, we can't really learn much about human psychology, studying weird
00:05:12societies, because this is a very sort of peculiar time in history. These are very strange,
00:05:15you know, weird societies in both senses of the term. Um, and so we need to collect data from
00:05:20other countries and other, uh, parts of the world and, you know, look, look historically and so on.
00:05:25Um, and I, I wondered like, like when we're trying to study psychology and we're trying to study human nature,
00:05:30um, what is more reflective of human nature too? Is it, um, you got to look at the hunter-gatherers,
00:05:37you know, whether extant hunter-gatherers or hunter-gatherers, you know, in pre-agricultural
00:05:42times when they were sort of scattered all over the world and had access to different kinds of land
00:05:45and territory and so on. Um, we got to study the hunter-gatherers in environments of relative
00:05:50scarcity, uh, because that's what humans, uh, that's how humans lived for most of our evolutionary
00:05:56history. That's what human nature is. Or is it, um, that can't be human nature because they lived in
00:06:01relative scarcity and they're, they're only behaving that way because they're stuck in this kind of,
00:06:06you know, archaic, pre-industrial, pre-literate society. And actually we should be studying rich
00:06:12societies because now that you have all of your needs met now sort of the true underlying,
00:06:16uh, uh, traits and attributes and characteristics can finally emerge and, um, you know, instantiate
00:06:22themselves. So it's kind of like the gender, gender inequality paradox, but it's like the abundance
00:06:27paradox, let's say we're becoming like, like what, what, what, I mean, yeah. Or, or, or does the
00:06:31question not even make sense that there is no real true human nature and that it'll always kind of
00:06:35interact with environments in weird ways. Yeah. Uh, both of the ideas came to my mind as you were,
00:06:41as you were saying that, uh, in terms of what the evolutionary push is just directionally, I think
00:06:45it's good to look at all the different, uh, types of societies. Do you find that in hunter-gatherers,
00:06:49does it persist even in weird societies? Well, sometimes that's quite good evidence of,
00:06:53in weird societies, often you have a push against traditional sex differences and they often emerge
00:06:58anyway, suggesting that there is an innate nudge. Um, yeah, if they get bigger in, uh, abundant societies,
00:07:08it may be that they're, um, expressing themselves more than the level for which they were selected to
00:07:15be expressed. So it could be that, uh, human nature is able to express itself to an unnaturally extreme
00:07:22degree, uh, potentially. Yeah. Does that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. You might not believe me,
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