Transcript
00:00:00Young men are now more likely to be unemployed than young women, yet young
00:00:03women are far more financially cynical, 21 points less likely than young men to
00:00:08believe they will ever out-earn their parents.
00:00:10White women are more likely to feel the country is racist than their
00:00:15non-white women middle-class partners.
00:00:17You white women are awful.
00:00:19I wonder how much of that is like related to that finding where the only way that
00:00:25women could be agentic was like on behalf of someone else, so like the
00:00:29more successful that you are or the more that you have going in your favor,
00:00:33the only like way that you can be agentic is to like be so deeply caring.
00:00:39There are some ethnographies on adolescent girls and the only ones
00:00:46that were allowed to be popular were if they were super, super nice.
00:00:49And so they had to like kind of over-deliver on like kindness in
00:00:54order to be allowed to be popular.
00:00:56And so it feels a little bit like that same pattern that like, perhaps
00:01:00women do this so the envy or resentment of other women won't bring them down.
00:01:05Joyce Benenson has this...
00:01:07Hero, friend of the show.
00:01:08Oh, she's the best.
00:01:09I'm obsessed with her.
00:01:10She has this paper on leveling showing that like women are more likely to use
00:01:15a leveling strategy where they say like, "Oh, we should all be equal
00:01:18when someone is surpassing them."
00:01:20And so I wonder if like, once you have all of these things operating in your favor,
00:01:25you kind of have to be like a martyr in order to like continue on.
00:01:30Otherwise people might not like you.
00:01:31Where do you get your victimhood points from?
00:01:33Yeah.
00:01:33I won't say who said it in our group chat, but someone replied to Rob
00:01:37Henderson bringing this up and said, "Middle-class hay fever, Rob.
00:01:40When there's no high load of parasites, people's immune system gets bored and
00:01:45starts looking for things to react to and you get allergies to dust and pollen.
00:01:48When the middle-class has no threats, their threat system gets bored and
00:01:52starts looking for trivial things to blow out of proportion.
00:01:54White privilege, gender identity, ultra-processed foods.
00:01:57It's all pollen.
00:01:58You don't have oat milk?
00:01:59You're traumatizing me.
00:02:00No explicit segregation and blatant racism?
00:02:03Sensitivity to microaggressions increases."
00:02:05That's what I was going to say is I think it's more time to introspect and ruminate
00:02:09because you have girls and young women not just picking up on icks in their partner
00:02:14and like scrutinizing them and looking for flaws, but then doing that to themselves.
00:02:18So constantly pathologizing, diagnosing themselves, wondering what's wrong with
00:02:22them over analyzing their personality traits.
00:02:25And so I do think it's just more time and less bigger problems, like say having
00:02:30children where you put your neuroticism, you funnel it into something productive
00:02:35and instead it then turns inwards or also against your partner.
00:02:39But there is status afforded to women doing that in that ecosystem, in that
00:02:43social system of higher education where women are dominating now, they're
00:02:48rewarded for espousing views like that.
00:02:50So, you know, they're showing that they know the ideology of the
00:02:54leading status people in their world.
00:02:57This is me showing fealty to the cause.
00:02:59I understand this thing.
00:03:00What's the data around men and women being demonized and seen as victims?
00:03:07So we have some studies showing that like we have this like kind of cognitive
00:03:13heuristic of victim and perpetrator.
00:03:15And when men and women are like involved in any instance of harm, we're
00:03:20more likely to see women in the victim role and men in the perpetrator role.
00:03:24We're more likely to blame men and more likely to have sympathy for women.
00:03:28And so it would suggest like perhaps some of the reason we don't see a lot
00:03:32of sympathy for men is it's like cognitively harder to see them as victims.
00:03:37And then for women, it's just cognitively easier to see them as victims.
00:03:42And so we feel that sympathy, but this is, it kind of sucks for both sexes.
00:03:47So in the domain of harm, men are disadvantaged and they're not seen as
00:03:51victims, but for women in the domain, in other domains where you'd want to be
00:03:55the agentic person, like if you're deciding on a CEO or a president, women
00:04:01aren't seen as agentic and as capable.
00:04:04So it's not like one sex is clearly doing better than the other.
00:04:08They're both facing these like...
00:04:09One doesn't get sympathy and one doesn't get belief.
00:04:11Yeah, I guess that's one of the challenges I think that women face
00:04:15when they go into the workplace that they feel like if they need to
00:04:17be assertive and dominant, they have to temper the throttle a bit a
00:04:20little bit for fear of being bitchy.
00:04:22They don't want to be a bitch or a diva.
00:04:25Yeah, I feel like there's like an agency warmth continuum and
00:04:29women are expected to be here.
00:04:31And if they go farther along agency, they're seen as low in warmth bitchy,
00:04:35but the same is true for men.
00:04:36They're higher on the agency side.
00:04:37And so if they show warmth by crying, they're not seen as competent.
00:04:41So like we're both encouraged to stay in our lanes.
00:04:44But if women show too much warmth, they're seen as pliable and not
00:04:48competent because it seemed that people that are a little bit more
00:04:51brusque are seen as higher competence.
00:04:54Warmth is negatively associated with competence, I think.
00:04:57And I just think this kind of protectiveness that we have about
00:05:01women, it just gets repackaged as oppression in a way.
00:05:06And I get that you could be paternalistic and overly and a lot of kind of abuse
00:05:10of women does occur under the guise of for their own good and protection.
00:05:15But it is astounding the extent to which we are more protective of women than men.
00:05:20You have to really contort yourself into a lot of knots to see the
00:05:26women are wonderful effect and think of it as oppression toward women.
00:05:30Like, can you, do you know much of the stats around the women are
00:05:34wonderful effect, like all of the different ways that people prefer women to men?
00:05:38I know one study that looked at this kind of where they looked at job hiring
00:05:42discrimination and it's gone down against women, but people overestimate its presence.
00:05:48And so they assume it's still there, even though the data suggests clearly it's not.
00:05:52So it's like, we're almost like just sensitized to detect it, even if it's not there.
00:05:57And even when you learn about some discrepancy, if it's against women,
00:06:02people are up in arms about it, but if it's against men, it's like, no biggie.
00:06:06Is attractiveness under-acknowledged as a kind of privilege?
00:06:10Oh, I think so.
00:06:11Yeah.
00:06:11So on both ends of the spectrum, so the pretty privilege, which also has its costs.
00:06:16There's costs associated with being seen as pretty.
00:06:18Other women in particular see you as more promiscuous and things like that.
00:06:22But there are enormous benefits across the board to being attractive, male or female.
00:06:27But then at the other end of the spectrum, there's enormous
00:06:30cost to being unattractive.
00:06:31And there is new research that shows that we're not readily able to recognize this
00:06:37form of privilege, we acknowledge other forms of privilege, but attractiveness.
00:06:41We're reluctant to acknowledge that it even exists.
00:06:44And we also have evidence that women are far more attractive than men.
00:06:48It's not just one okay cupid study.
00:06:51Loads of data unpublished from our lab finds this attractiveness discrepancy.
00:06:55There's tons of data.
00:06:56Women are just more attractive.
00:06:58So arguably a feminine advantage in the domain of attractiveness, when that can
00:07:03be translated into so many resources.
00:07:05There are studies to show that beauty is status for women.
00:07:09Women defer to more beautiful women in the way that men defer to more formidable men.
00:07:15So this is an advantage.
00:07:17And it could be another thing that's actually a less acknowledged point
00:07:20about what's putting women off having children is that they hear these horror
00:07:25stories, they literally have to take a massive beauty hit.
00:07:27And that's just, there's no way around that.
00:07:29It's less than they've ever had to take, but it's still there.
00:07:32It's so funny that having kids would impact your beauty, but the effect of
00:07:39pretty privilege is denied and hidden.
00:07:41It's like, well, if that is playing into it, you have to admit the fact that it's there.
00:07:46Yes.
00:07:47You know?
00:07:47Yeah, I don't think people would acknowledge at face value.
00:07:51That's one of the reasons.
00:07:51Well, you do see them sometimes women are like, I'm not sacrificing my body for that.
00:07:55And, you know, we have new data come out that shows that relationships
00:08:00having, being a parent, similar levels of happiness to not being a parent, greater
00:08:06levels of meaning for the parents, especially for women, but lower
00:08:10relationship satisfaction for the parents.
00:08:12So it does take a toll on the relationship, but certainly on the woman's
00:08:16mate value thereafter, having the kids, the toll it takes on her beauty.
00:08:20So you can kind of see why women, if there's all these benefits, they can
00:08:23translate their beauty, which is their status into, they'd be reluctant to
00:08:28sacrifice all that.
00:08:29Yeah.
00:08:30I mean, this is kind of what we were talking about before, which is that I
00:08:32think social media platforms have incentivised women to see themselves less
00:08:36as human and more as products.
00:08:39And so their life becomes about marketing themselves and optimizing themselves.
00:08:43And so I think, yeah, having a child disrupts being the perfect, pristine
00:08:48product, but then we're in this really weird scenario where don't you want to
00:08:52look good in order to reproduce and have children at base level, but now Instagram
00:08:58comes along and Instagram gives women so much dopamine and status that then that
00:09:04becomes a higher priority.
00:09:05Yeah.
00:09:06Because it's a misconception about evolutionary psychology that we have these
00:09:09fitness optimizing mechanisms.
00:09:11We actually have, we're adaptation executioners.
00:09:14So it's not like, it's just that behaviors that over evolutionary time would have
00:09:19resulted in more offspring are passed on.
00:09:22So women still have the desire to have sex for the most part.
00:09:26People don't come into the world with, oh, I really want to increase my reproductive
00:09:31success.
00:09:31I want to have offspring, but they do want to be seen as a high make value to others,
00:09:37have sexual urges.
00:09:38And over time, those things would have resulted in reproductive success.
00:09:41So now it's a bit of a mismatch.
00:09:43Joyce Benenson, she has this like cross cultural study where she shows like among
00:09:48young people, one of their primary goals is finding a romantic partner, but one of
00:09:53their lowest goals is having kids.
00:09:55And so she makes this argument that like we probably evolved a desire to attract a
00:10:01mate, but we didn't need to evolve the desire to have kids because so long as you
00:10:05were having sex, you were having kids.
00:10:06You didn't have reliable contraception.
00:10:08Yeah, it's a hugely evolutionary novel technology that's really just thrown the
00:10:13whole thing up in the air.
00:10:14I think also in the young women, sometimes the relationship becomes an accessory.
00:10:18To display online.
00:10:19What was your line about that in the episode that we did a couple of years ago?
00:10:23It was a relationship to just brand partnerships now?
00:10:26Yeah.
00:10:27It's something to display.
00:10:29And so the characteristics that maybe you would select for before social media are
00:10:34very different.
00:10:34Now it's presenting it to other women and how other women will react.
00:10:38Seeing your, yeah, your launch of a partner online.
00:10:42Yeah, the soft launch.
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