There is likely a strong statistical selection effect for both jerkiness in men and craziness in women. If someone is sufficiently desirable to the other sex, they can get away with being difficult.
“Men have essentially zero risk and zero cost in having sex.”
In the ancestral environment, we might have to go back pretty far for this to be true. I might be wrong, but I don’t think hunter-gatherers lacked social norms about sex or means of enforcing them. The cost was social rather than biological, but it existed.
And of course, in contemporary society, paternity is costly, and sex involves a risk of paternity. This again is not as direct and immediate as the costs carried by women, but is not essentially zero.
Perhaps men act as if there were no cost? How do we distinguish between a situation with zero cost and a situation where the benefits are considered much greater than the costs?
Why are women typically on a different margin than men? The costs seem higher, but the risks are also more under the woman's control (as in, if she is determined not to have children yet, she can use the pill, etc. ). While this is not completely reliable, it seems relevant. So there must be more factors.
Perhaps lower libido, or different criteria for sexual interest provide part of the answer?
But more than anything, I would think competition is a big factor. Attractive women, I am led to believe, are flirted with and propositioned frequently. If a woman is not particular, she can find a partner. While there are a few Lotharios that have women competing for their attention, I am pretty sure it is a much rarer phenomenon.
I have also been led to believe that there is a difference in response to stimuli. That is, women are less likely to experience orgasm the first time (or any time, really), while a man often has the opposite problem of finding things so stimulating that there is danger of embarrassment. I guess we could put this on evolution also, if the different responses would tend to increase reproductive success differently for women and men. This can end up as hand-waving, though. Evolution is always the answer, just find a story.
A feminist would mention historical patriarchy as a factor. Powerful men preferred virginal or at least chaste women, as less likely to be infected with disease or to give birth to some other man's child. This cultural norm has faded in the west, but has not disappeared entirely.
Evolution works on a different time scale than you are using. You mention birth control, which has been with us 1.5 generations. You are not wrong that smaller tribal groups would have had social control, but many of us, if not most are descended from warriors who raped and pillaged for generations. I was reading a thing recently about how a few thousand years ago the male input to the species collapsed. That happens frequently. Raiders do not kill women in their child-bearing years or soon to be in them. They may sell them into slavery, but the genes keep going.
So… going on a raiding party to rape the next tribe over is zero risk and zero cost? Or staying home and having sex with the local girls is zero risk and zero cost? Or is there a third option I am missing?
I hear that bonobo males can have sex with zero risk and zero cost. But not chimpanzees.
You make some good observations and get quite lost also — which is understandable; it’s very complicated and simplistic answers, while initially appealing because they make sense, then get completely shot down.
PS. Sadia Kahn spouts a lot of nonsense, quite often toxic advice. She sure is hot, though!
Interesting post; I'll comment on your confusion about women wearing hot outfits, which is apparently difficult to explain as women are not supposed to want more sex unless they are weird.
First of all, young unmarried women want a lot of sex (and by "sex" I mean "romance including sex", of course). See here: "Among 20-year-olds who had been dating for about 2 years, no mean sex difference was found in self-reported sexual desire." DOI: 10.1023/A:1018721417683
The women who want less sex can be found among those in long-term stable relationships (women go through a sharp libido drop after 2 or 3 years into a safe, stable relationship), and the post-menopausal cohort.
So, when I see a young woman dressed up to attract men, I naturally guess she's looking for romance. (And most women prefer their romance with a serving of sex.) To make it clear, she's probably not looking for "plain sex" without romance; without romance, she wouldn't get aroused. (Other women, correct me if I'm wrong.) This is also why girls refuse sex so often that it makes it look like they don't care about sex: if they don't get a romantic feeling with the guy in question then sex with him wouldn't work at all.
Even the women who don't want either sex or romance (e.g. because they are in a stable relationship), usually enjoy looking desirable, so they may dress up attractively anyway.
There is therefore no reason to torment your brain for other reasons for such behavior, such as power-seeking. Most women are not interested in grabbing power over men (citation needed); most women are interested in finding romance.
I think you are mistaking attractive clothing for "hot" clothing. Men and women like attractive clothing. Women wearing almost nothing are clearly signaling their fertility and desire to exercise it. This is why some young women fight with their mothers over clothing. Over-protected young women too often have no idea what they are signaling and the danger it attracts.
There is indeed this difference: just attractive vs provocatively hot. But the reasons why young women decide on the latter are not so clear. There can be several: 1) this is how women dress in this part of town, they get socialized into it; 2) she really-really wants to find a man for tonight (being either lonely or horny), and she has noticed that provocative clothing works better than anything else; 3) she enjoys the feeling of being desired very much; men react to provocative clothing and thus she gets this pleasant feeling more readily wearing it. The fourth option proposed by the author - seeking power over men - strikes me as a theory held by an alien who doesn't have an intuition about how a female human's mind works. It wouldn't have occurred to me at all. But maybe I'm the alien and other women are indeed going about hunting for pure power this way? There don't seem to be enough other women in these corners of the Internet to support or contradict me...
>Note that ~80% of murder victims are in fact men, so on that score, it would seem that men should be more anxious and fearful.
I don't know if such a ratio held in the ancestral environment. I see this study: https://sci-hub.st/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20708349 which found that in a prehistoric population, the share of female crania showing trauma was over three times that of male crania.
Of course there could also be differences between the sex ratios of those who suffer assaults, and those who suffer deadly assaults.
Women also have more delicate skulls. Their bones are smaller and weaker as well. Female bone density is lower, and they lack the upper body strength to effectively protect against attack. This is why that rule of men never hitting women exists.
I'm always happy to see content like this. I think we need more (FAR more) content which criticizes and supplements the dominant cultural narratives in play right now, which are clearly unworkable and absurd.
I suspect that free-loaders were murdered, not annoying members of one's tribe who produced. The guy who hunts or farm's well can be forgiven. Once who contributes nothing should be killed so women and children do not waste food on him.
In many ways this is the greatest problem confronting the West. Having a simple rule, only those who work shall eat, can easily keep societies on track. Ending that rule not only results in dead weight, it brings down those who would otherwise be thriving.
Only misery would come from such an existence. People are not sane with infinite leisure. Wealthy people that lounge around end up drug addicts or take their own lives. Those who find a calling will have the sanity to enjoy modern technology. I have lived long enough to see too many suicides, and all of them were a result of men lacking a mission.
The fruits of of some distant future (21st millennium would be year 200,000 I believe), but after a mere two millennium we still have much work to do, and as mammals we require effort to thrive as opposed to survive. A lion in a case is just as miserable as a lion in a gilded cage. The only downside is that fashionable careers become extremely competitive with little need to compensate those who engage in it (for example, journalism, academia, elected government officials, various segments of the arts,...). I am currently shocked at how many wealthy people are putting serious money into their personal youtube channels. It might seem frivolous to some, but if that keeps their minds engaged, then they stave off the existential dread of existence.
Different and not contradictory observation. If male power is expressed as face to face confrontation, female power evolutionarily derives from group intervention. Here I recall an example from 'Hierarchy in the Forrest' where a group of females successfully stop an out of control alpha by collectively making aggressive sounds. The 'neuroticism' perceived as "crazy" by men could have something to do with how aggression is expressed: strong affect and threats not clearly articulated (per the male perspective). To which you can add enforcement of norms that may seem contradictory: as Joe Henderson recently pointed out, the seemingly equalizing group censure of alphas getting more women is also animated by a competitive desire to have exclusive alpha access. No judgement, its only business.
"It is that as a matter of empirical fact, women just have evolved to have a lower sex drive."
The truth is much more nuanced.
* Women generally have a lower drive for *casual sex* compared to men, primarily due to social and biological factors.
* In a secure and trustworthy relationship, women's sexual drive may be equal to or even higher than that of men.
* From a physiological perspective, women have the potential for greater sexual pleasure, but this of course depends on several factors such as the quality of the relationship, proper stimulation, and familiarity with their own body.
*Additionally, for men, the sexual act "costs more" in biological terms, resulting in a lower potential for pleasure.
This feels intuitively accurate (anyone who's been navigating the dating scene recently would likely find this obvious...).
I haven't found much research on this but this is insightful:
You’re arrogant in your conclusions and frankly, I find your tone way too aggressive. Are you free for coffee?
very slick comment, ms. woolery (i presume). 😀
There is likely a strong statistical selection effect for both jerkiness in men and craziness in women. If someone is sufficiently desirable to the other sex, they can get away with being difficult.
This made me laugh!
"In brief: if you keep finding that men are bad, it could mean that you are choosing bad men."
“Men have essentially zero risk and zero cost in having sex.”
In the ancestral environment, we might have to go back pretty far for this to be true. I might be wrong, but I don’t think hunter-gatherers lacked social norms about sex or means of enforcing them. The cost was social rather than biological, but it existed.
And of course, in contemporary society, paternity is costly, and sex involves a risk of paternity. This again is not as direct and immediate as the costs carried by women, but is not essentially zero.
Perhaps men act as if there were no cost? How do we distinguish between a situation with zero cost and a situation where the benefits are considered much greater than the costs?
Why are women typically on a different margin than men? The costs seem higher, but the risks are also more under the woman's control (as in, if she is determined not to have children yet, she can use the pill, etc. ). While this is not completely reliable, it seems relevant. So there must be more factors.
Perhaps lower libido, or different criteria for sexual interest provide part of the answer?
But more than anything, I would think competition is a big factor. Attractive women, I am led to believe, are flirted with and propositioned frequently. If a woman is not particular, she can find a partner. While there are a few Lotharios that have women competing for their attention, I am pretty sure it is a much rarer phenomenon.
I have also been led to believe that there is a difference in response to stimuli. That is, women are less likely to experience orgasm the first time (or any time, really), while a man often has the opposite problem of finding things so stimulating that there is danger of embarrassment. I guess we could put this on evolution also, if the different responses would tend to increase reproductive success differently for women and men. This can end up as hand-waving, though. Evolution is always the answer, just find a story.
A feminist would mention historical patriarchy as a factor. Powerful men preferred virginal or at least chaste women, as less likely to be infected with disease or to give birth to some other man's child. This cultural norm has faded in the west, but has not disappeared entirely.
Evolution works on a different time scale than you are using. You mention birth control, which has been with us 1.5 generations. You are not wrong that smaller tribal groups would have had social control, but many of us, if not most are descended from warriors who raped and pillaged for generations. I was reading a thing recently about how a few thousand years ago the male input to the species collapsed. That happens frequently. Raiders do not kill women in their child-bearing years or soon to be in them. They may sell them into slavery, but the genes keep going.
So… going on a raiding party to rape the next tribe over is zero risk and zero cost? Or staying home and having sex with the local girls is zero risk and zero cost? Or is there a third option I am missing?
I hear that bonobo males can have sex with zero risk and zero cost. But not chimpanzees.
You make some good observations and get quite lost also — which is understandable; it’s very complicated and simplistic answers, while initially appealing because they make sense, then get completely shot down.
PS. Sadia Kahn spouts a lot of nonsense, quite often toxic advice. She sure is hot, though!
Interesting post; I'll comment on your confusion about women wearing hot outfits, which is apparently difficult to explain as women are not supposed to want more sex unless they are weird.
First of all, young unmarried women want a lot of sex (and by "sex" I mean "romance including sex", of course). See here: "Among 20-year-olds who had been dating for about 2 years, no mean sex difference was found in self-reported sexual desire." DOI: 10.1023/A:1018721417683
The women who want less sex can be found among those in long-term stable relationships (women go through a sharp libido drop after 2 or 3 years into a safe, stable relationship), and the post-menopausal cohort.
So, when I see a young woman dressed up to attract men, I naturally guess she's looking for romance. (And most women prefer their romance with a serving of sex.) To make it clear, she's probably not looking for "plain sex" without romance; without romance, she wouldn't get aroused. (Other women, correct me if I'm wrong.) This is also why girls refuse sex so often that it makes it look like they don't care about sex: if they don't get a romantic feeling with the guy in question then sex with him wouldn't work at all.
Even the women who don't want either sex or romance (e.g. because they are in a stable relationship), usually enjoy looking desirable, so they may dress up attractively anyway.
There is therefore no reason to torment your brain for other reasons for such behavior, such as power-seeking. Most women are not interested in grabbing power over men (citation needed); most women are interested in finding romance.
I think you are mistaking attractive clothing for "hot" clothing. Men and women like attractive clothing. Women wearing almost nothing are clearly signaling their fertility and desire to exercise it. This is why some young women fight with their mothers over clothing. Over-protected young women too often have no idea what they are signaling and the danger it attracts.
There is indeed this difference: just attractive vs provocatively hot. But the reasons why young women decide on the latter are not so clear. There can be several: 1) this is how women dress in this part of town, they get socialized into it; 2) she really-really wants to find a man for tonight (being either lonely or horny), and she has noticed that provocative clothing works better than anything else; 3) she enjoys the feeling of being desired very much; men react to provocative clothing and thus she gets this pleasant feeling more readily wearing it. The fourth option proposed by the author - seeking power over men - strikes me as a theory held by an alien who doesn't have an intuition about how a female human's mind works. It wouldn't have occurred to me at all. But maybe I'm the alien and other women are indeed going about hunting for pure power this way? There don't seem to be enough other women in these corners of the Internet to support or contradict me...
>Note that ~80% of murder victims are in fact men, so on that score, it would seem that men should be more anxious and fearful.
I don't know if such a ratio held in the ancestral environment. I see this study: https://sci-hub.st/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20708349 which found that in a prehistoric population, the share of female crania showing trauma was over three times that of male crania.
Of course there could also be differences between the sex ratios of those who suffer assaults, and those who suffer deadly assaults.
Women also have more delicate skulls. Their bones are smaller and weaker as well. Female bone density is lower, and they lack the upper body strength to effectively protect against attack. This is why that rule of men never hitting women exists.
I'm always happy to see content like this. I think we need more (FAR more) content which criticizes and supplements the dominant cultural narratives in play right now, which are clearly unworkable and absurd.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-fantasy-of-female-power
Living jerks are proof of their excellence because other men haven’t yet gotten together to murder them.
I suspect that free-loaders were murdered, not annoying members of one's tribe who produced. The guy who hunts or farm's well can be forgiven. Once who contributes nothing should be killed so women and children do not waste food on him.
In many ways this is the greatest problem confronting the West. Having a simple rule, only those who work shall eat, can easily keep societies on track. Ending that rule not only results in dead weight, it brings down those who would otherwise be thriving.
one might argue that technology has obviated the need for all or most to work for all to enjoy the fruits of civilization in the 21st millenium.
Only misery would come from such an existence. People are not sane with infinite leisure. Wealthy people that lounge around end up drug addicts or take their own lives. Those who find a calling will have the sanity to enjoy modern technology. I have lived long enough to see too many suicides, and all of them were a result of men lacking a mission.
The fruits of of some distant future (21st millennium would be year 200,000 I believe), but after a mere two millennium we still have much work to do, and as mammals we require effort to thrive as opposed to survive. A lion in a case is just as miserable as a lion in a gilded cage. The only downside is that fashionable careers become extremely competitive with little need to compensate those who engage in it (for example, journalism, academia, elected government officials, various segments of the arts,...). I am currently shocked at how many wealthy people are putting serious money into their personal youtube channels. It might seem frivolous to some, but if that keeps their minds engaged, then they stave off the existential dread of existence.
Different and not contradictory observation. If male power is expressed as face to face confrontation, female power evolutionarily derives from group intervention. Here I recall an example from 'Hierarchy in the Forrest' where a group of females successfully stop an out of control alpha by collectively making aggressive sounds. The 'neuroticism' perceived as "crazy" by men could have something to do with how aggression is expressed: strong affect and threats not clearly articulated (per the male perspective). To which you can add enforcement of norms that may seem contradictory: as Joe Henderson recently pointed out, the seemingly equalizing group censure of alphas getting more women is also animated by a competitive desire to have exclusive alpha access. No judgement, its only business.
The post that most women should read about stuff most men already know, yet will be read by mostly men
There is theoretical and empirical support for why beautiful women are "crazier", not at least angrier.
https://x.com/ZixuanMaWrites/status/1893506624867684413
"It is that as a matter of empirical fact, women just have evolved to have a lower sex drive."
The truth is much more nuanced.
* Women generally have a lower drive for *casual sex* compared to men, primarily due to social and biological factors.
* In a secure and trustworthy relationship, women's sexual drive may be equal to or even higher than that of men.
* From a physiological perspective, women have the potential for greater sexual pleasure, but this of course depends on several factors such as the quality of the relationship, proper stimulation, and familiarity with their own body.
*Additionally, for men, the sexual act "costs more" in biological terms, resulting in a lower potential for pleasure.
This feels intuitively accurate (anyone who's been navigating the dating scene recently would likely find this obvious...).
I haven't found much research on this but this is insightful:
1. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/reproductive-health/articles/10.3389/frph.2024.1275941/full
2. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/726583?journalCode=ajhe