Chapter 1: Why do Gen Z women feel negatively towards men?
Did you read this new Statesman article?
I did.
Okay, what did you think of that?
I thought it was fascinating. I thought it was concerning, but also a little bit predictable that women are, well, there was a lot in there. There was, you know, women are, have a bleak outlook on life and that they are also spending a lot of time online, which is making everything worse and that they dislike men, um, so strongly more than men dislike women. Um,
I think that this is to be predicted by an evolutionary framework. Throughout human history, women were very vulnerable because they are targets of sexual abuse. Because they're reproductively valuable, they're smaller on average. And they needed assistance getting the calories for themselves and for their children. And the data suggests women's foraging isn't enough to sustain even themselves.
So women who signaled their vulnerability through looking kind of pitiable would have been favored. But also... Any display beyond that.
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Chapter 2: What role does evolutionary psychology play in women's perceptions of men?
So communicating sadness, communicating need would have been favored. So I think this kind of tendency towards a bleak outlook on life. make sense. And in fact, women perceive themselves around the globe to be less happy, less healthy than men, both mentally and physically. And so this is a common pattern. And there also seems to be like a social contagion effect to it.
So if you look at women's interactions in And when they are sad, their partners, whoever they're interacting with becomes more sad. Their depression spreads through networks in a way that men's doesn't. So there's also like a social contagion effect. So I think a lot of this makes sense. And then if you look at like the men hating.
It also makes sense that if women needed to signal their loyalty to one another, so if they were often in these patrilocal environments where they weren't around their family or kin, then one way to communicate to other women, you can trust me, is by being loyal, a really good friend, but also probably being a girl's girl. And one way to signal you're a girl's girl is by hating men.
Hannah Bradshaw has some cool research showing that women who...
Chapter 3: How do differing political views affect relationships among young people?
are guys' girls tend to be not trusted by other women. So if you have more guy friends, they don't trust you. They think you're more provocative. And so I think some of this is also related to that. I think there's a lot going on.
Is that in-group loyalty thing around the guys' girl stuff?
I think so. So she didn't test it in that framework. She tested it as like just what do you think of a girl who only has guy friends or a girl who has girls friends? And women like the girl with girlfriends more and trust her more. But in some of our data where we looked at kind of this asymmetry and concern for men versus women,
women showed the bias to a stronger degree than men did so i think if you put those two together i think women might be like advocating for women to signal to one another i'm on your team yeah yeah i think that's exactly right tanya and to add a few more evolutionary perspectives to that i was listening to the podcast from the journalists who did the research and i was just banging my head against the wall thinking there's so much evolutionary psychology at play here you can't
see it and there's also an error management perspective so everything in evolution is a trade-off and between costs and benefits and for most of our evolutionary history women were making the trade-off that they were benefiting by selecting men who would be able to provision them with resources and be able to protect them now those are no longer as salient as benefits to modern women who are
earning their own money, achieving their own status, and living in a pretty safe world, even if they don't always feel it's all that safe. So those are no longer really key benefits that men can provide.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of social media on women's dating preferences?
So they're looking for men to provide other benefits that they're just not stepping up to the plate to do. So if you think about it from an error management perspective, the costs of selecting a bad mate still are exactly the same as they were throughout ancestral history for women, but the benefits just so that basically the juice is not worth the squeeze for modern women.
So like I read the article and our lab focuses on sexual conflict and one of the solutions to sexual conflict that we always kind of promote is to try and encourage cross-sex mind reading. For the last number of years, I've tried to get people to see it from the men's side that, oh, well, imagine how it would feel to suddenly be asked
to provide value in ways that you don't really know how, that your status, you're being outpaced in status, and you can no longer add value in those domains. But now I'm trying to put the cross-sex mind-reading hat on and imagine it from the woman's side, and...
from a trade-off perspective in terms of mating they're living up to their side of the bargain men value physical attractiveness far more than women and that was one of the key benefits that women provide as a mate when modern women look better than ever right and they're bringing more to the table they're actually contributing resources and status as well and it's not like men hated those things and only liked physical attractiveness they just didn't the bonus
It just wasn't as key a benefit as it is to women. So men are getting more and more from women, whereas women are getting less and less, and they're looking for different things. And that was the key thing that came through, is that the traditional benefits that men were providing were no longer ones that modern women were looking for.
They were looking for things like shared political ideals, emotional intelligence, things like that, even humor and stuff. And I think that modern men are just a little bit lost, but there is a way back for them to provide value in different ways. But it's just the case that modern women are happier to choose singlehood than risk choosing a costly mate.
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Chapter 5: How does the concept of 'looks maxing' influence modern dating?
And if you look at modern relationships, there's this pathway towards long-term committed relationship that has to go through this ambiguity, that goes through this kind of uncertainty of dealing with fuckboys, going on these dates, getting spurned by men, because the modern mating market allows for deceptive men to pursue a deceptive strategy at unprecedented rates.
It's incredible, like you have unprecedented levels of anonymity, access to millions of potential mates. So for the first time in history, you can actually pursue a purely short-term deceptive mating strategy without weathering many of the classic costs that you would have.
her kin and her friends are no longer really going to take revenge on you because you live in a city millions of miles away from them. They don't know who you are and you just move city. And you know, a lot of men are pursuing this strategy. So women are thinking if that's the pathway towards a committed relationship, I'd rather not because they're getting, they're not getting the benefits.
Uh, so the pathway to get to a relationship is laid with all of these different trip wires that you can kick. And women are worried about kicking one or many of them, or maybe have in the past and have gone, actually, I, I can support myself financially, socioeconomically without this.
But I guess this, the rubber's gonna meet the road eventually, because unless you're gonna do IVF sperm donor, you need to have a partner eventually, if you ever want to have a family.
Yeah, but it's just the case that women's status-seeking goals have become very important to them. They've been crushing it in the socioeconomic arena, and it's a fact that getting with a long-term male partner is a massive hindrance to a woman's career.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of emotional expression in male friendships?
He's not really going to want her to be around other high-status mates and rivals at work. He's not too crazy about that idea often. He often wants her to stay home and be the caregiver. That's often what she wants when she gets into a long-term relationship. So if you culturally lionize, I know it's a bit trite to say like the girl boss culture, but That does clash with relationship formation.
It takes time to pursue a career. And it's just, those two things are at odds. My mother famously said, actually women can have it all, but just not at the same time. So that's a bit of modern wisdom from Mammy Costler.
One in four young women say that their partner having a different political view to them would be a red flag in a relationship. However, on particular political issues, women's stance is more hardline. Six in 10 say they would find it difficult to date someone who disagreed with them on the Palestine-Israel conflict or did not share their views on Donald Trump.
74% say they'd find it difficult to be in a relationship with someone who did not share their views about social justice. Young women are also more likely than young men to say they would not have a relationship with someone who disagreed with them over immigration.
Chapter 7: How do societal expectations shape women's choices in relationships?
I mean, that's so interesting to me because I feel like my generation's view of morality is basically these far away conflicts in the Middle East. It's things that aren't happening to our lives directly. But we seem to have this thing where we will treat how men behave as their sort of personal preference. It's their subjective judgment on things. So it's like a morally relative culture.
And so the only way we can judge a man by his morality is, is he posting about Palestine? How does he feel about immigration? Because you can't say this is right and wrong because we're not as religious anymore. We can't really say that there is morally good and morally bad. And so we have to use these really easy kind of signifiers of morality.
It's the thumb finger waving on social media of what can be easily identified, what can be easily advertised.
I thought it was funny when I was listening to the podcast that these women, their activism is very important to them and they were very frustrated at what to me sounded like classically male typical status driving even in these circles.
Chapter 8: What are the challenges faced by young women in today's dating market?
So there are some men who are going to identify this as an opportunity to... Woke fishing. Woke fishing, that's a nice term for it. But the women were complaining that The patterns of behavior they were engaging in, they were very interested in giving the speeches, running for positions of leadership. And I was like, it's all just a different type of status game.
And the same frustrations with men will exist in these domains as anywhere else.
Why do you think there's this sort of lean to the left when it comes to women? What's in a female disposition, predisposition that seems to have this sort of progressive... list at the moment being very compelling?
I think it might have to do with if women evolved to evoke care and signal their vulnerability, then it would make sense from a niche construction perspective that you should design a world that gives aid to the vulnerable. So it's in your interest to design a social world that transfers resources to the vulnerable.
Because you're going to appear more vulnerable.
If you see yourself as vulnerable. Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And so it can be. But I also think it functions twofold. It's both beneficial for them, but it's also a signal of their kindness. And other women really dislike unkind women or any signs of cruelty, competitiveness. And so what I kind of wonder is, like, is this all a competition to display to other women?
I am so pro-social and kind. And then maybe your romantic partner is a reflection of you. So it's a stronger signal that I'm committed to these causes if my romantic partner also is or if I don't have one altogether because they're not good enough.
I'm willing to pay the honest signal of I'm foregoing a romantic partner because there are none who meet my standards on this subject. And with kindness, usually there's target specificity that women usually prefer a partner who's really kind to them. And they're less so keen on a partner who's kind to others, except if there's massive status associated with someone who's kind to others.
And that is in this arena, in this political arena today. signaling your kindness to others is the high status.
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