Dr. Jordan B Peterson on Femsplainers

Welcome to the Femmes Planers. I'm Danielle Crittenden.

I'm Christina Hoff Sommers, and we are thrilled to have the father of all Manse Planers in our studio today. Yes, a man whisperer and the mad genius behind the intellectual dark web. Whatever. Welcome to the Femme Slater's, Jordan Peterson.

Thank you very much! So delighted to have you, and it's an honor to have you.

It's, um, and a note to our listeners: we're recording this in front of a live audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, where Christina is a resident scholar. There'll be video of the podcast as well, and we will let you know where to find that when it's ready. We're also grateful to AEI every week for the use of its recording studio for the podcast.

And now for an introduction, though he needs no introduction to the people here. But Jordan Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto and author of many books and posters of many fantastic lectures. His most recent book has—I can’t keep track of how many languages it’s been translated into—and the sales...just a phenomenally successful book tour!

In fact, my first question is really about your tour. You look pretty good considering you've visited, what, a hundred cities in the past?

Since January 23rd.

I don't know how you do it! Mostly flying?

Well, what do you do for fun? Do you ever get to relax in brief moments?

What do you do?

Go on Twitter.

Oh, God, yes. Although I would qualify that as relaxing, and I try to, you know, forestall that temptation as much as possible. Well, I have the automotive time that I could spend with my wife—she does travel with me—and so, you know, we've had to try to take some time to walk around the cities that we're in and see what we can.

We're usually not at any given place for more than a day or two, and they're usually pretty packed with, well, whatever is associated with the lecture and then with press that the publishers usually arrange.

I heard you interviewed in Sweden. You were in Stockholm, and you had half an hour to visit the city with your wife.

Yeah, and you know, you loved it.

But that, you know, it's...yeah, well, you take your breaks where you get them.

Well, the thing is that the lecture tour is unbelievably positive. Yes, and a lot of this is ridiculously positive.

You know, like if I'm going out on the streets now or in cafes or, you know, airports, I meet people all the time, and they're always polite and they're always happy to see me. They always have some very touching story to relate.

And then the audience themselves are very positively predisposed to whatever it is that we're doing together, and so that makes it a lot easier to stay motivated and to continue, right?

You know, I mean, it’s demanding because everything's scheduled so tightly, and I do a different lecture every night.

I find that amazing because I give a lot of lectures, and I anguish over every word, and then I have another one.

And you go up without notes?

Yeah, well, I have a large collection of, you know, things that I know how to talk about. Usually what I try to do is to formulate a problem before the lecture, so I'm addressing a specific problem, right?

And then I can track how I would set up the argument, and then I walk through it. But part of it's also an attempt to formulate the argument on the fly, you know, to make the question what would you say, formulate it more precisely and to make a more precise and engaging answer.

Then I can use the audience to judge whether or not that’s happening, and so it’s also a real challenge to do that. So I enjoy that, and it's an excellent intellectual workout.

I've been recording the lectures, and I've been using, for some of them, to write the first draft of the chapters for my next book and four books after that. And so, you know, I'm able to maximize the—what would you say—the utility of doing this at each event.

And my wife seems to be particularly well-suited to traveling like that. She actually enjoys it quite a bit and is a very stable person, and so that’s also helpful.

So, and you know, it’s nice to have an extra brain along because things are scheduled so tightly that we don't ever have any room for error.

Yes, well, we’re going to... I can’t—I don’t know how intellectually rigorous we plan to be with you today, because we know that when you’re on one of these platforms, you’re talking about your ideas. But on the Femmes Planers, we want to hear a little bit more about Jordan Peterson the man.

I desperately want to hear about your wife, Tammy. Yeah, and also you’re so well-known for your views on men and how your ideas have been taken up so enthusiastically by young men, but we want to talk to you about women.

Yep, that's good. So, but one of the things you and I share is that we both grew up in Canada. I promised Christine I would not do my Canadian accent while you were here, but you grew up in rural Alberta.

I grew up in Toronto, and you are, what, the country’s most famous guru now since Marshall McLuhan. But does the fact that you came from Canada have any effect on your views, do you think? Has it formed you in any way?

What would it—wouldn’t it be the same if you think you’d grown up in rural Texas? How has Canada contributed to your worldview?

She’s always looking for the Canadian angle.

Well, I think the particular part of Canada I grew up in probably was formative to some degree. I mean, the town I grew up in was only fifty years old, you know, and the particular part of the world that I grew up in was really the last settled part of the North American prairie.

This was outside of Edmonton, correct?

Yeah, both 400 miles north of Edmonton.

400 miles?

Yeah, yeah, it’s right at Short—so, it's short.

Yeah, so the prairie—no, the prairie stretches up that far north. It stretches up farther north in Alberta than it does anywhere else in the North American continent.

And so, we were at the tip of viable farming, essentially. And so, it was a new place, and it was a rather raw place, and it was a rather harsh place in many ways, especially because of the winter.

And it was fundamentally a working-class place, although a prosperous working-class place, right? Because most of the industry there was related to the oil and gas industry, although it was cyclical. When things were good, working-class people could make a very good living.

This was during the seventies, to be a kid in 400 miles outside a small town?

Yeah, I liked it when I was a kid. I wouldn’t say it was as fun when I was a teenager. But I'm not convinced that, you know, the majority of people who are teenagers necessarily have the most wonderful time of it.

I think adults often look backwards at the past through rose-colored glasses.

I can’t— that’s what the cartoonist Trudeau accused Reagan of doing continually.

Um, Gary Trudeau, the American—I think the words Institute—oh, no, no, I used for it in your book was teenage wasteland.

Yeah.

But it’s Canadian as.

Just do you see how that forms you or affects you, if at all? Maybe it didn’t.

It’s hard to say. I mean, I’ve lived in lots of different parts of Canada now, and Canada is quite different. I lived in, well, Alberta for a while, and it had this particular flavor of existence.

I mean, mostly in Fairview, I was striving to leave, mm-hmm, and to move ahead, let’s say.

Or to move—I hesitate to say up, but somewhere different.

Somewhere more urban.

But that’s the case with many people. I mean, the small towns all across the West in the US and in Canada are dying.

Mm-hm, they’re down to nothing because everyone’s moved to the cities.

I lived in Montreal for a good while, and that was interesting because it was a very, very different culture.

It was a culture that was, to some degree, stratified by language and by class, and none of that was true in Alberta because it was so new that there’s no class structure. So that was quite interesting, right?

And you worked—what I loved—pulled a passage, because I think, as you say, people are born in small places everywhere, and want to leave, and some don’t.

You said, “I wanted to be elsewhere.”

I wasn't the only one. Everyone who eventually left the Fairview I grew up knew they were leaving by the age of twelve.

I knew, and my wife, who grew up with me on the same street, knew.

Well, what’s that thing? What would you call that? What’s the thing that makes you want to leave and sets you off?

Because, as you point out, there was no class system; education was cheap in Canada.

Oh yeah, it wasn’t cost; it was upbringing.

You were from a—what, middle class?

My father was a teacher and my mother was a librarian. No, no, she had trained as a nurse.

So, you know, we had a comfortable, I would say suburban lifestyle, essentially.

You know, I’m moderate middle-class suburban lifestyle.

That’s what Fairview looked like; it looked like a suburb that was built mostly in the 90s, between the 1950s and the 1970s.

So young Jordan, and then young Tammy—and you have to tell us that story, how you met, but wanted more?

Well, you know, I think that’s one thing that is different to some degree about class. My father and my mother had both left two towns they were from, and they were forward-looking, future-looking people.

Most of my friends who quit school and who didn’t attend university, they didn’t have that sense.

I would say that more developed sense of a world outside of what they knew.

And the other thing is that my father took us on long trips when I was a kid. He was a teacher, and so he had summer holidays, and we drove all over Western Canada and down into the US—long driving trips, thousands of miles.

You know, that also gave us the sense that the world was a bigger place.

But I knew way before I was twelve I believed that I was off to at least university.

And I think generally, in your family, if you’re liable to go to university, people don’t even really talk about it; it’s just a given that that’s what’s going to happen.

It’s something that you take in with every breath— it’s an uncertain and unspoken expectation.

And maybe people make casual reference like, “Well, when you go to college?”

But it’s not like there’s a question about it, whereas if you’re from a working-class background, especially if your family hasn’t pursued post-secondary education, that isn’t in the realm of unspoken or spoken expectation.

And it wasn’t like, like lots of my friends— including many of them who dropped out before they hit high school. They weren’t by— they were by no means the dimmest people in the class.

Like they were plenty smart, but they weren’t oriented towards the idea of pursuing a career that involved intellectual—what, intellectual engagement wasn’t in their worldview.

And you know, when you hear people on the left, let’s say, more socialist end of the distribution, talk about barriers to education, they often talk about cost.

And sometimes cost is a barrier, and it’s more of a barrier, sure.

Although there’s still plenty about community colleges and state colleges where you can, right, get educated for a perfectly reasonable amount of money.

But for my friends, no, it was never a reason; money was never a reason they didn’t pursue post-secondary education.

It was more like a truncated view of time, I would say.

There was more of an emphasis on the here and now only, and there were jobs aplenty, I guess?

Well, there was also doubt, yeah, you know, and, well-paying jobs—like it wasn’t obvious that you were in better shape economically to go to university.

Oh, yeah, especially if you were doing something like working on the oil rig, right?

Right, but, you know, that was rough, cold, harsh work and it wasn’t—it wasn’t once you had an inn you could stay employed, but it wasn’t that easy to land an entry-level job either.

So, yeah, well, it was wise for lots of working-class people to work in those jobs because they were unbelievably lucrative.

And they should have been because they were very difficult and dangerous and frigid cold and rough, so you know, it’s not like the people didn’t earn their money.

Well, just tell us quickly, like, how you met your wife. You were— you met her when you were?

Seven or eight?

Third grade?

Third grade, yeah.

And did you fall in love with her in grade three?

Grade three, yeah, it wasn’t mutual.

[Music]

What? There were lots of the boys in grade three who were in love with her.

She had a whole little crew of guys that were perfectly willing to follow her around, and she was perfectly willing to exploit that.

She’s very good at it, yeah.

She was very popular.

It’s just so wonderfully—you met as children. There were friends for a long time.

You know, we used to play chess together and croquet, and she’s a vicious croquet player.

She would—I don’t know if you’ve ever played croquet, but if it’s with your balls touch, then you can stand on the ears and whack it, and then the other person’s ball will...

Oh, she did vanish off into this stratosphere!

And she liked to knock it all the way down the street!

Then she laughs.

So she always had a good sense of humor.

A good vicious sense of humor, it’s one of the things I actually admire about my wife.

When we’ve had our verbal disputes—which, you know, have certainly happened—she can string together a sequence of insults that’s so hair-raising, then you have to laugh.

What, did she have brothers?

She did. She has a brother, much older— eight years old, because quite a peaceful person.

And I rose with brothers, you know, seemed to get along with guys because they would show love and affection by insults and jabs and jeers and...

Yeah, and if you—and I had a brother, and I started learning, okay, I could do that.

But if you don’t have brothers, girls are like, oh, that’s so rude.

That’s so—yeah, so she was...

Well, she has a naturally—there’s maybe, because she’s naturally twist—she did well, and her father is quite sharp-witted, and he was a real town character.

He’s still alive, huh?

He was a real character in the town, a real hyper-extrovert.

Everybody knew him, and he had a pretty good wit on him, and she had some of that—well, still has some of that.

So she was her, you know, aside from her acerbic humor and her ability to whack balls.

And I just don’t want to go further on that description.

That’s it, of many, many things that tells us about you.

What else brought—what else attracted, I mean, you’ve known her pretty much your whole life.

So some of the other qualities that not just attracted you but enable you to sustain...

I mean, I think every young person in this room will want to know, and maybe there isn’t one, but what’s the secret? What’s it like to be with someone that long? How do you sustain that?

Well, I think if you’re fortunate—some of it’s good fortune, you know?

And I would say this is true. I’ve watched people in their relationships, you know, personally for a long time but also as a professional because I’ve done a lot of clinical counseling.

And, I mean, there are some things that need to be a given about the relationship, I would say.

It doesn’t hurt to find the other person very attractive, you know?

And that’s a mysterious thing. We’re not exactly sure what it is that produces, let’s say, chemistry between people, although chemistry is definitely part of what produces it.

There are subtle things that attract people to one another that are way below the level of consciousness.

So, for example, women don’t like the older men who have our each blood factors, who, if they had children with, would be likely to produce a stillborn infant.

Well, that’s definitely a category on Match.com, right?

Well, it’s so strange, though because, well, that’s a good question, and you know, apparently.

And so, there’s—or wearing cologne.

Well, then it would depend on what type of-

Right. Smell is a very strange sense, and it’s very deeply tied to very profound emotions—including memory—and so you find people attractive for reasons that you can’t always determine.

And so that was part of it. I mean, I’ve always found her very attractive, and that continues.

And I liked her combativeness, you know? Like, I think that there’s—you want someone, I think, in a relationship that you can spar with, and it’s partly because you have hard problems to solve.

If the person that you’re with isn’t willing to put forward their opinion, then you only have half the cognitive power that you would otherwise have, you know?

And hopefully, you find someone who’s interestingly different from you—like not so different that you can’t communicate, and you have to be careful of that—but interestingly different, and then hopefully they have the ability and the will to express their opinion.

And, well, then it’s, you know, then—then your interest stays heightened.

And there has to be that tension in a relationship. You know, people think, “Well, I want to get along perfectly with my partner.”

It’s like, no, you probably don’t. You just get bored, and then you’d go looking for trouble.

So you want a little bit of trouble in the relationship and a little bit of mystery and a little bit of combativeness and the ability to exchange opinions forthrightly.

And, I trust her, which is a huge element.

I mean, when we finally did decide to get together permanently, we were both in our later 20s.

And, you know, one of the things that I had learned by that point, and insisted to her about, was that we had to tell each other the truth.

And she took to that wholeheartedly, you know, and for better and for worse because truths can be harsh.

Does that include, like, does this have?

Yeah, well, the truthful answer to that is I don’t answer questions that are likely to get me in trouble.

Yeah, so my—I have a son who will answer honestly, and it’s infuriating.

But then we realized, if you want the truth, talk to Tam.

Well, that’s the thing, you know, it’s useful to know—truth is empowering; truth-tellers are charismatic.

And, you know, actually, both my sons are like brutally honest, which is disconcerting to me. But it’s minh, see, that it has made them very formidable.

And because of it, people trust them, and the friendships, and just— it gives them mood.

And you’ve written a lot about this.

Well, you know, if I tell my wife that she looks good in an outfit, she knows that I mean it.

And so there’s some utility in that.

And then if you’re silent and say, “I don’t answer questions,” and she goes, and she knows...

Well, sometimes, sometimes, you know, she’ll say, “You know, do you like this?” and I’ll tell her that I don’t—and, you know, it doesn’t necessarily make her happy in the moment, but if I do say I like it, she knows that I mean it.

And, you know, I’d actually like her sense of style a lot, so it turns out that 90% of the time, it’s pretty easy for me to say, “Look, I think you look great,” and mean it.

And, you know, she’s a fairly harsh standard bearer, too.

She’s insisted that I stay in whatever reasonable physical shape I happen to be in, you know?

That was something that she’s very demanding of.

And I would say that it’s the same from my side.

And, we’ve been good at negotiating, which is, you know: what do you want from a partner, fundamentally?

What do you want, need? I mean, the first thing is that, well, hopefully you, like I said, you’re blessed with the fact that you find each other attractive.

And I think it’s very difficult for the relationship to begin or proceed or sustain itself without that.

But having that, then what do you want?

Well, you want someone that you can trust. You want someone that you can build a view of the future with.

And you want someone that you can negotiate with.

And that’s very hard to negotiate with people because they have to tell you what they think; they have to know what they want or figure it out; they have to tell you what they want; they have to be satisfied when they get what they want, which is also a very difficult thing to manage.

And you have to continually update that because your life goes through different stages, and well, and your attraction wanes, as we all know it—our stage of life—not fatally necessarily for yourself.

But no, but you will go—I mean, you will not be twenty-five forever, so that has to be renegotiated.

Yeah, well, and you have to work at that too, right?

You know, and that’s something that people also don’t understand because they tend to think that, well, that all romantic interaction should be spontaneous.

It’s like, well, if that’s your theory, then you might as well just give up right now if you’re going to get married because that—like the only reason you can think that is because you don’t have enough responsibility to make romantic entanglement virtually impossible.

And what happens when you’re married, especially when you have little kids, is that—and you both have a job, let’s say—is you’re so busy that the probability that you’re going to find time for spontaneous mutual interaction decreases to zero.

And so if that’s what you’re hoping for, then you’re never going to have it.

And so what you have to do is you have to make time for each other.

And, you know, if you’re dating when you’re establishing a relationship, well, you put some effort into it; you know, you decide that you’re going to go out for dinner and you dress up to some degree, and you know, you try to present yourself to each other in some halfway mutually acceptable manner, and you hope that there’s going to be a positive consequence of that—that you’re going to find each other attractive.

But then, somehow, people think that once they’re married, that the same amount of effort isn’t necessary, and that’s wrong.

I would say more effort is necessary on the same front, and you have to think it through.

It’s like, you know, if you don’t want to be bitter about the intimate element of your relationship, how much time do you have to spend together each week?

And my rule of thumb, sort of derived from clinical observations, is that you need to spend 90 minutes a week with your partner talking.

And that means you’re telling each other about your life and staying in touch, you know, so that you each know what the other is up to, and you’re discussing what needs to be done to keep the household running smoothly, and you’re laying out some mutually acceptable vision of how the next week or the next months are going to go together, right?

So that keeps your narratives locked together like the strands in a rope.

You need that for 90 minutes or you drift apart, and you need to spend intimate time together at least once a week and probably more like twice.

And that has to be negotiated.

And if you don’t negotiate it, and if you don’t make it a priority, then it won’t happen, in all likelihood.

And then, well, then you don’t have it, and that’s a catastrophe because there’s not that many things in life that are, you know, intrinsically—what would you say—engaging and meaningful and pleasurable and also bonding—all of that.

And if you let that go, then, well, part of you dies and part of the relationship dies.

And, well, then there’s always the possibility of becoming attracted by alternative entanglements, which you would do if you had any spirit left, right?

I mean, that’s the thing: if—well, if you’re not—if your relationship at home is entirely unsatisfying sexually, what are you supposed to do with that?

Nothing? You’re supposed to just bear it?

I mean, in one way, the answer is yes because it’s your marriage. But another way is, well, what—that’s all the fight you’ve got in you—you’re gonna just let the erotic element of your life die and accept everything that goes along with that because you’re not willing to cause a bit of trouble to ensure that it’s maintained?

And, you know, we’re not very good at thinking these things through consciously.

And I mean, people are bad at negotiating, period, as far as I can tell, but they’re particularly bad at negotiating things that are deeply private.

How much do you want your partner to know about you anyway?

It takes a lot of trust to have a real conversation about what you need and want.

Now, you have in the press—people read that you are—you have a following of young men and I went to hear your lecture in Washington, DC, and there were a lot of women there.

And your book—I had, first of all, men don’t buy books that often compared to women, so I’m presuming you have a lot of female readers.

And I found it—Danielle and I found it completely readable.

And for men, no, it was no one. It was more like a delusional desire on the part of the radical leftists that the only people that could possibly be attracted to me are angry men—angry young white men, you know?

Okay, then that fits the narrative.

But yeah, there’s a—it’s a—you have a diverse audience, a diverse following, including many women, and they’re also not particularly angry.

I mean, are you diffusing the anger? That’s the point of your book—stopping, yes—not being resentful, right?

Well, resentment is— that’s absolutely crippling, right?

It’s resentment, deceit, arrogance. That’s part of writing the book, and one of the rules is don’t allow yourself to become resentful, resentful, deceitful, and arrogant.

Things together, yeah, it could be radical if you just write.

Well, that’s supposed to be a good thing.

So yeah, I mean, there’s been 250,000 people, as I said, come to the lectures, and there hasn’t been a single negative incident.

This is what I find fascinating is that I—I found you early on and said I had no idea you—I just—that it was like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, like, “Who is that guy? Who is that guy?”

Like, you were pretty good, and we were covering a lot of the same topics later on, and wow.

And then, you know, I found out who you were.

What is astonishing to me is that there’s this amazing—it’s just split between the positivity of your audience, the diversity of your audience, the intellectual content of your message, and then you get with a snarky journalist with an agenda.

I’m not mentioning names, but this would be...this—no, baby, no—this young woman from GQ.

Oh, yeah.

And it is beyond sight. It was just like, “You lady, gotcha.”

That was Channel Four. We don’t want to blame the BBC, it was Channel Four’s...

And I had...

She seemed, you know, like—that's often—she seemed intelligent and capable of insight up to a point.

But it’s almost as if something had seized her mind.

Oh, yes, something had.

Something for sure.

I think people in ideology can—you apologize that a whole generation—some of our most talented young women are incapable of thought because of this idea.

Where she thought maybe you mean, or just—it's just an openness to—she couldn’t...

And you were saying completely, like, interesting, fascinating, original things—even to me, who’ve studied these topics.

And, wow, and no, it was quite the day!

So I went to Baltimore.

You said I did, yeah.

Well, any—but it just made me think a lot that day because I went there and I had to go out of my way to do it— not that I'm complaining, but there’s a reason for saying that.

You know, so I go out there, and Baltimore—yeah, well I was talking in both.

Okay, so—and I showed up to the hotel room where this was all occurring.

And you know what you expect, generally speaking, even from journalists who aren’t, you know, who are more of the attack dog variety or who maybe aren’t positively predisposed to you ideologically or personally; you expect a certain modicum of professional politeness, right?

You know, because, well, you don’t have to be there, and you came and you invited—invited an invitation and all of that.

And so even with the Channel Four journalist, Kathy Newman, she was quite polite and forthcoming in the green room before the interview.

You know, it so she would have at least that professional persona, which is—it’s not nothing, right?

There’s something to be said for going through the motions professionally in an appropriate manner.

But when I walked into the hotel room in Baltimore, it was obvious that this interviewer had already made up her mind about me a hundred percent, and that she was absolutely, you know, negatively predisposed to me with a personal animus.

An animus is exactly the right word.

And there was about a half-an-hour photography session because it was GQ, and so I was in that atmosphere.

The photographers were fine; I was in that atmosphere for about 45 minutes before we started to talk, and part of the reason that I’m so—I’m not as calm during that interview as I usually am—I’m a little bit harsher—and the reason for that is that, you know, it just started off instantly combative.

And what I should have done, you see, it’s very, very difficult to be awake enough to do these things properly.

And the interview progressed fine, although by the end of it, I thought that I had maybe done enough interviews for a while because I didn’t think I had regulated my temper as well during that interview as I might have.

Well, for the first two minutes, you were getting—and then she brought up a question about anger.

And I just saw you kind of adjust, and then after that, it was smooth.

Well, that’s good because it was touch-and-go, you know?

And I thought, boy, you know, maybe you’re running out of patience, maybe you know—maybe it’s time to dial back on the interviews because, you know, I’ve had many interviews like that, and they’re very...

I find them—like, and it takes me like three days to recover. I know!

And then you got—you start thinking yourself, like, what I should have said—I should have said that—and I drive myself mad!

No, but you did very well.

But it’s so interesting that what it told me was how parochial she was and she lives in her own little world.

Isn’t it more a little bit about the ideology of our time?

And gosh, you encountered this everywhere, and I used to write about this wisely— I put—I would encounter it.

I mean, I think part of the issue is that you will acknowledge that there are differences between the sexes.

That seems to be—I know that’s a hell of a heresy.

That’s a heresy because when I was reading your book, there is nothing about it that is anti-female; in fact, you do a lot of examination of the Adam and Eve story.

And you have this wonderful passage about, like Adam being the originally aggrieved man who throws a woman under—the perfect God, you do.

You made her and the rules, such as they are, you know, they seem very commonsensical—they could apply to anyone, so is that a fair surmise of why you get so attacked?

That just the very fact that you’re willing to speak about the sexes as being not unequal but different but equal?

Yeah, well, you know what I would say—that’s part of it because there’s a threat there.

So one of the things that happened when I was in Scandinavia, I just wrote a column about this, actually.

It was interesting being in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden, because they pushed the equality of opportunity doctrine farther than any other country.

They invented it—it almost started there.

And the week that I was there was the same week that two articles were published on gender differences in temperament and in interest.

And the biggest sex differences that we know of that aren’t morphological are in interest.

So women are more interested in people, by and large, and men are more interested in things, by and large.

And the difference is actually large; it’s one standard deviation.

And so that means if you’re a man, you would have to be more interested in people than 85% of men to be as interested as 50% of women.

And if you’re a woman, you’d have to be more interested in things than 85% of women to be as interested as the 50th percentile male.

So the difference is actually quite substantial, and it’s certainly large enough to drive occupational choice differences.

And it explains a lot about the configuration of people in the work—

Absolutely, well, and you know, we’re approaching parity in terms of workplace—overall workplace distribution women—but there’s massive difference as in occupational choice.

Like, it’s very interesting for example to go to the website of the US Labor Department and look at male and female dominated industries.

And you know, there’s the top 10 male-dominated industries have basically zero women in them.

People—bricklayers are being wonderful!

Like, people—there are people through zones—according to Camille Paglia—you find just a lot of men in the people-free zone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the women are in—you ask a group of women and men, would you rather spend the next three weeks taking a part of a machine and putting it together or helping a group of people work out their problems?

And the pool of people who want to do the machine is just far more men than—

Well, and there’s more men in women-dominated industries than there are women in men-dominated industries at the extreme, so that’s like nursing.

Yeah, yes, it is way more male nurses than...

And more bricklayers.

I’ve studied these male nurses, and they already, you know, gender activists are upset because they earn more than women.

And a professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania tried to find out why, and she found out they immediately find out what’s the best paying field, subfield, so they go into, like, nurse anesthesiology—it pays a lot more.

The men are there, in just proportionate numbers, too, and they’re willing to work in crap, you know, in st. hours; they’re far more willing to—with gender differences is that men are more willing to work longer hours, yeah.

They’re more willing to take on dangerous tasks; they’re more likely to work in scalable industries.

So, like, you can’t scale personal care, it’s really very, very difficult.

They’re much less likely to work part-time; if they have small businesses, they’re much more likely to work full-time in the small business rather than this, than part-time.

Yeah, and I mean women have their reasons to want to work part-time.

And Farrell also pointed out that if you work 10% longer hours, you make 40% more money—nonlinear, nonlinear return on overtime—that’s something that’s really useful to know.

You know, it’s closer to an employer; they have some, but it also marks you out.

You know, like if you have 10 employees and they’re all doing a reasonable job, let’s say, but one of them is working that extra half an hour a day or 45 minutes a day and you can observe that every day, then that gives them an edge with regards to potential promotion.

And so, and the return on those edges is nonlinear.

And so anyways, so I went to Scandinavia, and it was the same week that two studies were released showing what had already been established beyond a shadow of a doubt—the personality differences between men and women and the differences in interest as well actually get bigger as your society gets richer and as it gets more egalitarian—and not just a little bit either.

That’s the other thing that’s so interesting is you might think, well, the effect is—it’s the opposite of what the social constructionist would predict.

First of all, so that’s the first thing to point out: it’s not only that their hypothesis wasn’t supported; it was decidedly refuted.

And none of them have come to terms with that.

And it’s not a small effect. The difference between personality between men and women in Scandinavia is a lot larger than ideas in Nigeria, let alone Botswana.

And that’s also true in the United States.

The richer the Democratic your household demographic your household, the more likely the woman is to take time out and be at home with—right, you can afford it; you can afford to do it—and she can afford to major in what, odd, you know, low-paying fields like, I don’t know, feminist dance therapy.

The other thing—see one of the things that’s also interesting, I think, is that, you know, there’s this idea that marriage is a patriarchal institution—you know, that’s primarily put there for the utility of the male and think, “Well, like, I think that’s complete bloody rubbish!”

And I don’t think there’s any evidence to support it at all.

But I think the best counter-evidence is that, well, if that’s the case, then rich people shouldn’t be getting married because they don’t have to oppress themselves.

But the truth of the matter is that the higher your demographic position, the more likely you are to be married.

So marriage is falling apart among, you know, in the more likely the wife is staying home, and—but not—I mean, she will have all sorts of pursuits but she’s not—well, there’s an old saying—any woman who marries for money earns it.

Yes, but now—okay, this is where you might get in a little trouble because in your book you call men order and women chaos and you say order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity and chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual select.

Yeah, what’s up with that?

Yeah, chaotic—okay, well, it isn’t men and women that are ordering chaos; it’s masculinity and femininity, symbolically.

And so what’s happened fundamentally is that where our brains are wired for social cognition, so we’re not natural scientists or natural sociologists that might be of bidders—even though I shudder to think that that might be true.

Especially, yes, well that’s—

Yes, okay, triggering or maybe, yeah, or ma’am or maybe we’re more—we’re more naturally people who observe through the lens of fiction.

And that what we see is the world is characterized—and the world, obviously, is made out of men and women and children, and those seem to be our fundamental cognitive categories—masculinity, femininity, and children.

And those categories have expanded to take on connotations outside of pure person perception.

And so, you know, it’s for this reason that if you go to a movie and maybe it’s a Disney animated movie—and I like to talk about those because they draw on a very deep symbolic well—it’s perfectly reasonable to see a witch that lives in a swamp because those go together; like it makes sense, you know, the witch doesn’t live in a gleaming chrome high-rise, you know, she lives in a swamp.

Guess that’s in maybe a quarter room.

I think that—you can take off better, but there are categories of symbolic association that are natural to the way we think, and the fundamental elements of those categories seem to be gendered.

And so, this is partly why I make reference to Taoism, for example.

So for the Taoists, the world is made out of chaos and order, and chaos is the domain that you don’t understand, and that emerges unpredictably, but also the domain from which new forms emerge, right?

Because it’s from novelty that the new emerges.

And I think the fundamental association between femininity is chaos is the association between what’s unexpected and novel and what’s new because new forms emerge from chaos.

And it’s not that chaos is bad and order is good; that’s not it—both have their pathology, both have their virtue, yes.

And, and what you’re looking for—and this is what the book concentrates on above all—is you’re looking constantly to find the balance between those two.

So, for example, formally speaking, the domain of order is that place that you are when what you’re doing is producing the results that you want to have produced.

So imagine think about the preconditions for not being anxious—okay?

So the preconditions are that you’re constantly making predictions about what’s going to happen next, and those predictions are tied tightly to your behavioral output.

So you act in a certain way and you presume that a certain thing is going to happen, and if your actions produce the results that you desire, then you assume that you know where you are and you know what you’re doing, and that your plan is intact and that the environment is secure, and that keeps your anxiety under control.

That’s order.

And then, you know, maybe you’re at a party and you don’t know anybody, and you tell a joke, and everybody looks at you like what you said was not only not funny, but also downright offensive.

And then all of a sudden you’ve moved from the domain of order into the domain of chaos because you thought you were somewhere and you thought you were someone and you thought you were with people that were of a certain type and you got all that wrong.

And so if you—are you also suggesting—is it going to be the woman who says, I find that really open?

But women are also more sensitive to negative emotion, so there is some slightly higher probability that that might be the case.

But then I think women are also associated, at least in men’s imaginations, with nature, which is part of the chaotic domain, say, as opposed to culture.

Because they’re sexually selective, so you’ve got to think what is nature?

I mean, we have that as a cognitive category, right?

We think of the natural world—we think of nature versus culture; it’s a fundamental opposition.

What is nature?

Well, nature is trees and landscapes and animals and all of that, but that isn’t what nature fundamentally is—nature fundamentally is that which selects from a genetic perspective.

That’s nature; that’s the fundamental definition of nature.

And it is the case that human females are sexually selective, and it’s a major component of human behavior.

So the, the evolutionary theory, roughly speaking, is that the reason we diverged from chimpanzees 8 million years ago, 7 million years ago, is at least in part because of the differences between sexual selectivity between female humans and female chimpanzees.

Female chimpanzees are more likely to have offspring from males, but it’s not because of their sexual selectivity.

So a female chimpanzee has periods of fertility that are marked by physical by observable physiological changes—not the case with human females.

Human female ovulation is concealed, so that’s a very profound biological difference between human females and chimpanzees.

And the chimpanzee females will mate with any male, but the dominant males chase the subordinate males away.

But human females are sexually selective, and so—and it’s not a trivial fact.

So you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.

You think, well, how can that be?

Well, imagine that on average every single human female has had one child throughout the entire course of history, which is approximately correct, by the way.

Then imagine that half of the males had zero, and the other half had two—okay, and that’s roughly the case.

So half of males, historically speaking, have been repressed, and the reason for that is because of female sexual selectivity.

So it is actually the case that female humans are nature; it’s not only that they’re—that they’re associated with nature symbolically as far as reputation is concerned; they are the force of nature that does the selection.

And so their nature, in the most fundamental way, and there is a chaotic element of that at least in relationship to men and also in relationship to women because a lot of the female-female competition is competition that’s chaotic for the right to be sexually selective—not only with regards to men, which drives a lot of politicking, but also in relationship to each other.

Because part of what human females do is jockey for position in the female dominance hierarchy for the top position, which is the woman who gets to be most sexually selective.

And so that draws female-female competition, and it’s a different dynamic.

There’s similarities between female-female competition and male-male competition, but there are also differences and they’re pronounced.

So men, for example, while men are more likely to compete for socioeconomic status—and that’s partly because that drives female mate choice—so the correlation for men between socioeconomic status and sexual success is about .6 and for women it’s 0-0.

In fact, it’s actually slightly negative.

So—and that’s a huge difference between men and women.

But you know the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy is like my favorite feminist theorist.

Although, as she would say, I'm a theorist who happens to be a feminist.

But she studied primate behavior, and she watched— she looked at the women very carefully—there were the females.

And I went very carefully and looked at chimpanzees and gazelles, and found that the female minissha—like male primatologists would look and say, “Oh, the females, the males are dominant and the females are so cooperative.”

She looked more carefully and said, “Oh, the females weren’t exactly cooperative— like they would pass around their infants, their baby, you know, whenever they were, and would fine.”

And so the male primatologist said, “Oh, they’re so kind and caring.”

She found out that when it was not your—it was not hers, they would take little tufts of hair that wouldn’t come out or they’d do something to the eyes and—the baby would like be injured.

And she saw all this violence, especially true in their status differentiation, yes.

So that’s much more likely—that’ll happen when a higher-status female is taking care of a lower-status infant, exactly!

And she said the great tragedy—well, not tragedy, she’s—the reality of our species—in fact, the subtitle of her book is “The Woman Who Never Revolved.”

We didn’t evolve for niceness and cooperation.

There’s an immense competition, and we can—according to her, we are indelibly marked in our nature to compete for the dominant males.

And it seems to cross culturally as well; that does flatten out a little bit in the more egalitarian societies.

Instead of being exaggerated, it does flatten to some degree, so you could imagine that there’s a biological component and a cultural component and both.

In that case, if you modify the cultural component, then that seems to decrease the overall—so like let me be more clear about this—women are less prone to mate up across an up-status hierarchies in Scandinavia than they are in less egalitarian countries, but they’re still prone to do it.

So worldwide, for example, women, young women find men who are about four years older than them maximally attractive and they tend to mate across and up status hierarchies.

And so one of the consequences of that, for example, is that as women have entered the workforce, they’ve actually driven inequality because rich women will only marry rich men, men as rich as them or richer.

Whereas rich men will marry women who are poorer than them, but women won’t.

And so what that means is it’s another factor that’s pooling wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

This is also sorted of mating now, and you just find someone with your background—whereas a doctor might have once married his secretary, you now marry another doctor!

Yeah!

Well, can I ask, then, stepping a little bit back from primates as well, how does this selection work in the era of swiping right and left?

What is your reaction to the way young people date today?

Oh, that’s a good—I was really hoping we’d get into that!

You were very into the monkeys!

So I didn’t want to interrupt!

No, no! Well, I should close off the Scandinavian discussion just by pointing out—and this is something that the Scandinavians are really going to have to wrestle with—is that if you institute effective policies to promote equality of opportunity—which the Scandinavians have done—you’re going to produce some equality.

So, like a 50-50 distribution of men and women in the workplace, but you’re also going to exacerbate certain kinds of inequality, and you can’t get it out of that.

So you cannot have equality of opportunity and equality of outcome together.

They don’t work together!

An equality of outcome—the essential equality of outcome doctrine, which is often described with the code word equity—is that at every level of every occupation, the people have to be represented by the same number that they’re represented in at the population.

So if it’s not 50-50 men and women at each—in each occupation, and at each Strada at each occupation, then that sort of prima facie evidence for discrimination and for systemic discrimination, it’s like, “Nope, sorry, you have to factor in choice!”

And choice actually turns out to be a very important determinant.

And as this society gets flatter and flatter, choice becomes a more important—a more and more important determinant.

And so you—so what that essentially means is that the most radical end of the left-wing political agenda is logically impossible!

In fact, it’s impossible for a variety of other reasons, and they should look at the data.

I mean, it’s just a cliché now of in a group of activists, and they’ll say, “Oh, well, we need—in order for women to achieve equality, we need government-funded daycare.”

And we need—they have it in Sweden; Sweden has fewer women in managerial levels.

American women are ahead!

In fact, now they have—that they have quotas over there, so they need female CEOs and females on boards; hasn’t made any difference.

They’re bringing in American women because we’re so much further ahead, so it’s like no difference in the distribution of men and women lower than, though it’s—it’s called the Nordic paradox.

And okay, you guys are so wonky!

I will get back—okay, yes, that’s good.

Good! Well, we all want to get back to—

Well, I was thinking this morning about—I was talking to a variety of political types and we were talking about this morning.

Yeah, in DC! It’s hard to believe!

Hard to believe!

No, I’m not—I’m not telling you—a bunch of Republicans here, and I’ve been talking to Democrats as well, but it was mostly Republicans here, and we were talking about abortion.

And I made a case that that’s really not a very productive discussion because you’re talking about a problem way too late in the sequence of problems.

So by the time the discussion starts to be about abortion, there are 50 problems that have already emerged that no one has addressed.

And some of those problems are the fundamental problem is how human beings should regulate their sexual behavior, and that’s a big problem. And you think, well, and there’s an interesting thing that’s happening.

You know, the people on the right would say, well, that’s easy— it’s like don’t sleep around and get married and have sex with your marital partner and that’s all the problem.

So there’s strictures on sexual behavior, and those would be the traditional ones.

And what you see on the left is that there’s this weird paradoxical demand, let’s say, that people should be allowed to express their sexuality in any manner that they choose whenever they want, but that sex is so dangerous that it has to be carefully regulated at every single stage of the interaction.

And so, you know that many state legislatures have now followed the example of university campuses and put in affirmative consent legislation.

So that every move you make towards physical intimacy has to be preceded by the instantiation of a verbal contract, essentially.

It’s like, “Well, can I take your hand?” Yes, you actually—from what I understand, you actually have to say yes.

Like nodding is not sufficient.

And so each stage has to be—it has to be preceded by affirmative consent.

And you know, which—well, I won’t—I won’t say anything about that—yeah, I will!

It’s absurd—it’s absurd to assume that that’s how human intimate relationships are supposed to proceed.

And then you have complicated laws emerging that are part of that that—for example, this is the case in California, as I understand it—is that you cannot give affirmative consent if you’re intoxicated, okay?

So you think about that.

It’s like, well, what does that mean?

It means that, like, a lot of sex, Jesus, has been illegal for a long time, including marital—marital, yes.

It seems to me—on my honeymoon—okay, well, buddy, I’m rethinking it.

It seems to me, it seems to me to mean—the California legislation that if you have sex with your wife or husband and either of you is intoxicated, then you’re either one of you or both is guilty of rape.

That’s what it looks like to me!

Actually, I was in a debate a few years ago at the University of Virginia Law School, and I turned to my debate partner and said, “So if what you’re saying is right, two people can rape one another?”

Right!

She said yes, and I said, “Oh!”

I mean, how can that be?

Well, that’s the question!

Well, okay, so then I would say, well, it’s interesting because I think that a lot of this confusion has emerged fundamentally as a consequence of the birth control pill.

So, you know, cause you got to think situationally before you think ideologically or psychologically.

It seems to me that the 20th century will be remembered for the hydrogen bomb, the transistor, and the birth control pill.

And those are unbelievably radical technological innovations and maybe the most, yeah...

But my—fairly on the door it’s dependent on the transistor, you know, cause I spawned all of that.

So that’s the big technological innovation that spawned all that.

And of the three, I would say the birth control pill is probably the biggest—hydrogen bomb.

So, and because it changed the fundamental biological nature of women and men, and because it gave women, for the first time in biological history, the option of choosing their reproductive status.

Yeah, and that—that’s—we like that, that’s absol.

Yes and no—like, yes, we like it, but it’s not something that’s come without a tremendous—it’s complexity.

A fellow can have—you been reading?

No, no, I think you’ll find him interesting; is he right?

Well, I’m not—I'm not making a case for the abolition of the birth control pill by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m pointing at its complexity.

And so because one of the questions is, well, once you can regulate your reproductive function, what attitude should you have towards sex?

And one answer might be the more of it under the more varied circumstances, the better, because why not?

And I would say that was actually part of the attitude that emerged in the aftermath of the birth control pill in the 1960s, right?

And it was—a reasonable response in some sense because it’s such a cataclysmic change that you don’t know what it implies.

Well, what’s the consequence of that?

Well, first of all, people aren’t reliable enough to use birth control in an entirely reliable manner.

So even though it can work at near 100% efficiency, you have to take it extraordinarily regularly and in a disciplined manner for that to work.

And so there was still the problem of unwanted pregnancy, let’s say.

And then there was the problem of the proliferation of sexual epidemics, and that culminated in AIDS, which, you know, could have easily wiped all of us out but didn’t.

But there are other sexual epidemics that could have had the same effect, but we’ve been fortunate enough to escape them.

And then more recently, there’s been this weird inversion, especially on the radical left, that points to the re-emergence of something like a set of sexual taboos, you know?

Like, I think the idea that sex is casual and that it’s a form of entertainment is, I think it’s an absolutely preposterous idea.

I think that it’s psychologically shallow beyond belief to hold that as a core proposition because it forces you to, first of all, if it’s repetitive sex with multiple partners, it forces you to treat people as if they’re interchangeable, and I don’t see how that’s good for you psychologically or for the people that you’re using interchangeably.

It implies that you can divorce sexuality from play, from the desire for a relationship, from emotional fragility, from love, from family, from responsibility—all of those things that are part of everyone.

And I don’t think you can, and I don’t think people’s experience indicates that you can.

And especially on the emotional front.

And I think that’s partly what’s driving—and there’s also a residual sense that there’s something about sex that’s fundamentally dangerous.

And maybe it’s dangerous emotionally and personally, and maybe it’s dangerous socially and psychologically, which it most certainly is because it’s a powerful force.

And the way the left is reacting to that is by insisting that all forms of sexual behavior are valid and that it’s reasonable to manifest all of them, but that it’s simultaneously so dangerous that absolutely every aspect of it has to be state regulated and in an increasingly draconian form.

And so I think what needs to happen is that the left and the right have to get together and have a real discussion about what constitutes sexual morality.

And that’s the conversation you have to have way before you worry about solving like the abortion debate, which, you know, is very divisive and very—very intractable.

One of the things we talked about actually just last week on the podcast is this cover story in The Atlantic about the sexual recession among young people that, despite the advent of the birth control pill, abortion is going down.

It’s that there’s a, there’s Lexus, and I think it’s going down—hook up, fewer—arms—have you—can’t help into that.

You’re about in on that.

Well, if you raise the cost of something, you decrease its prevalence, you know?

And I think it seems to be, you know, a Juris now.

I don’t know why—I kind of think that it’s also a reflection of the same thing that Bloomberg reported on just a few days ago; they said that across businesses, men are thinking, “I’m not spending any time with a single woman that isn’t, you know, associated with me in some formal manner, like my wife; I’m not going to do it; I’m not going to mentor young women; I’m not going to be in a room alone with them because I could face career annihilation.”

Absolutely!

And instantly, they’re frightened of young women.

Escaping Julian said that’s part of it, but we can over-exaggerate the part.

I mean, anxiety and depression is going up amongst both young men and young women.

Suicide is going up.

That there’s—it’s not just a—you know, most people, I think, are not—we’re talking about an elite demographic who is into the consent and political correctness and work with their—

This is across the board, and it’s global.

It’s in—it’s happening even in Sweden; it’s really happening in Japan!

Yeah!

And Japan, exactly!

So many things are—and that speaks to—and especially in Japan, they have—people, especially young men, have given up on intimacy and that having sex is actually—that was too much trouble!

Sex robots!

Right!

Well, right!

Well, and there’s pornography—yeah, there’s photography.

Basically, zero risk meters when you allow for pornography, that—that men and women will sort of separate that from their actual sex.

Anyway, we’re seeing a whole, I guess, collapse of intimacy, let alone sex!

And, and I don’t think that’s just explained by the political nature.

So I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Yeah, well, I don’t know that—I don’t know the literature on the decline in sexual activity well enough to know if it’s valid or reliable, but I mean, I think that, you know, in a stable society, you take lots of things for granted—

You take—you take the fact that men and women are going to be sexually attracted to one another for granted; and even though it’s more fragile than it appears, you know, it’s suppressed more easily than you might think.

And you take the idea that men and women are going to move together towards the establishment of long-term intimate relationships for granted, but that’s partly because you don’t understand what invisible preconditions exist to make that self-evident.

You know, and when those invisible preconditions are disrupted by rapid technological or sociological change, then things shift underneath you and you don’t know why.

Like a lot of it is traced to the advent of the smartphone, especially in the Generation Z that a Kate was explaining this to us—that you could see it was broadband internet and the smartphone that led to this, you know, increasing fall-off of relationships.

Yeah, well, maybe the abstract is more interesting than right.

You see that?

Good!

I just wanted—I want to know the truth.

Have you ever been with somebody you loved?

And I’m fascinated—all that, but you really want to get back to your smartphone?

Has that ever happened?

Yeah, well, it happens all the time. It happens to me!

No! It happens during our podcast!

And I’m kind—I’m researched!

Well, they’re very—or they’re very addictive!

They’re very addictive!

You know, I read the other day that—but they’re very alluring!

They are!

Kind of going together—the preferred method of interpersonal communication between young people now is texting rather than face-to-face communication, right?

And the swiping the apps!

Yeah!

Well, that’s—that’s a whole—that’s—that’s a very interesting topic too, that like the Tinder phenomenon—that’s because that’s also a major technological revolution.

Because what it’s done, I would say, for the first time is reduce the cost of rejection to males to zero, because it hides it.

The only people you ever hear from are people who haven’t rejected you, although they true—but there was one man who had to make 300—he actually tallied it—yeah, he had to make 300 requests of swiping right to one reply.

Already he had the sense of—

Sure, sure!

But it’s massively attenuated because you’re not being humiliated at all.

Not at all!

It’s really at arm’s length, and you can swipe very, very rapidly.

And so you can get all that rejection over within a very short period or less be worse—not—I mean, not nearly as bad!

Yeah, so—and you know, I don’t know what—and I mean Tinder also reduces—the one of the other things that you want to think about with regards to sex, and I think this is probably particularly true for women—is that to what degree is it in women’s interests to allow the cost of sex to fall to zero?

Because with pornography, certainly does that—and it just seems to me that that’s not a very good long-term strategy for relationships between men and women because whatever sex is worth, the cost of zero is the wrong price.

And so that’s, you know, I bunny ranch and paid quite a bit for it.

Well, true, true!

But you—but that’s true—but you know, you don’t have to.

And you know I’ve heard from a number of women—what written— read blog reports on their frustration with their attempts to be relatively sexually selective.

Like, let’s say they decide that they’re not going to sleep with their new partner on the first date, you know?

They’re frustrated by the fact that to the degree that they’re being cautious in their sexual behavior—which I think is actually an admirable idea—that they’re instantly outcompeted, especially if their partners are somewhat impulsive, by women who will say yes at the drop of a hat.

And so, well, again, I don’t think it depends on what the goal is.

That’s the thing is that there’s the short-term sexual gratification.

But the literature indicates that married couples, for example, or couples in a permanent long-term monogamous relationship are more sexually satisfied than single people.

And maybe the single people have to be parsed out into those who are sexually successful and those who aren’t, but I suspect that wouldn’t make that much difference.

But whatever, there’s the utility of relatively immediate sexual gratification for whatever that’s worth and the adventurousness that goes along with that—let’s say the hunt and the excitement of having a new partner and all of that—and maybe even the danger that’s associated with that because people like to have a little bit of danger in their life.

But what’s the goal?

It’s like, what do people want?

And I mean, there’s a great book called “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” that was written by Google engineers, and so it contains great psychology because Google engineers don’t care about political correctness, and they just write down what they find.

And they don’t even notice that it’s politically incorrect, hence James tomb, for example.

And what they found was that women use pornography just as much as men, but the pornography that women use is verbal; it’s not imagistic.

And that the pornographic novels essentially follow the same extraordinarily standard plotline to the degree that publishing houses like Harlequin—which I was going to say—it’s the bodice rippers!

That’s right!

So in the Harlequin series, you have, you know, that were published like in the 1970s that are pretty tamed.

Well, there’s a variety—they range from—they range from completely tame to essentially to hardcore pornography, but the plots are quite similar, and the plot is, you know, young relatively innocent woman finds powerful, interesting, dangerous male, tames him, and then they live happily ever after.

Yeah, it’s the Beauty and the Beast plot.

You search for women on Pornhub.

We discovered—we did an episode on porn.

It was for women—it was getting—rape!

Wasn’t that like—there’s no lesbianism?

Or at least that was your report?

Yeah, that was yours on me!

Okay, my report is going to the Williams-Sonoma store!

I know it is!

It’s female!

All those men and women should never tell one another their fantasies because when they’re outraged by what we say and we’re totally bored by what they say, and I thought, like—women have kind of these scenarios.

And you know, I don’t know— you know, I don’t know what their storylines—storylines and matters like I don’t want to say this to you, but if there’s a lot of just close-ups of female body parts?

Yeah!

Well, men are much more visually oriented, I know, sexually.

And—but now they’re being shamed!

I mean, now that it’s called the male gaze!

Mm-hm.

And so there’s all of us think, oh my God, the Sports Illustrated is exploiting the female—forget it!

Yeah, baby!

Men like it!

And I’m worried that now sort of the way in the past sexual sub— you know, gays were shamed, we’re now reversing it and shaming like heterosexual.

Yes!

That’s different.

We had the young woman who complained about being whistled at, and I said, “Don’t worry; it stops!”

Yeah!

Do we have a little bit of time for a couple more topics with you?

Because one of the things that is coming out of this younger generation—and you have a chapter of it in your book, which I—sorry, I wanted to finish what the line that we were pursuing!

I do this!

Well, with sexual behavior, the question is what’s the endgame?

And then this is what people have to ask themselves is, like, one of the core to the female pornographic romance is actually the establishment of a long-term relationship.

And the question is, you know, it’s so funny because I got pilloried in The New York Times for talking about enforced monogamy, squirty!

Because that gets brought up, like in everyone I talked to that!

Women—two days, I know, it’s just like a little side comment, and then that became like a showcase.

Like, enforced monogamy?

You mean forced marriage?

No! I mean, that was an anthropological term what she knew perfectly well because she’s a very smart person, and all it means is that there’s a pronounced proclivity in human societies around the world to enforce monogamous relationships at multiple levels of the sociological hierarchy.

You do it culturally, you do it—you do it in expectation; you do it legally, you know?

An enforced monogamy—so if my son was just married, and if he came to me next year and he said, “You know, okay, Dad, guess what? I’ve managed to have four affairs in the last year with hard women, and my wife hasn’t found out about any of them!”

I’m not going to pat him on the back and say good job, kid!

You know, I’m gonna say, “What the hell’s up with you?”

You know, you violated the vow that you took; you’re putting your whole future at risk; you’re betraying yourself and your wife and, well, that’s enforced monogamy.

You know, the idea is that the social norm is the establishment of a long-term monogamous relationship and that there are strictures put in place to support that but also to punish deviation from it.

And you say, “Well, you know maybe not so much on the punishment.”

But you can—it depends.

It’s like, what do you want?

What is it that you want?

Do you want a long-term stable relationship?

Or not?

And if that’s the goal, then your behavior should be devoted to whatever it is that facilitates that goal.

And I don’t see that—I certainly don’t see that casual and impulsive sex fits that bill.

Now, not in the least.

And all of the evidence with regards to living together shows that that’s actually detrimental to the establishment of a long-term relationship, so first of all, common-law marriage, people who are in common-law marriage are much more likely to be divorced.

So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is, people who live together before they get married are much more likely to be divorced after they get married.

The idea that, well, you can try someone on for size and see how it works and then you’re going to see if you’re compatible, it’s like—that’s one story.

Another story is, how about you and I live together for a little while and, you know, if you’re not so bad but maybe I can find someone better, and if I do, you know, in the next year and a half or so because we’re not hooked together in any formal way, I can just trade you in.

It’s okay; you can do the same to me.

But I don’t really see that as the sort of complimentary mutual interaction that leads to the formulation of long-term trust.

And I think it’s a better story for interpreting what constitutes living together than, well, you know, we’re going to try each other out because that’s what mature people would do—rental!

Yeah!

Well, that’s right—that’s it!

And, and, but most importantly, the data indicate that it doesn’t work.

Is that you’re more likely to get divorced, not less likely, because maybe the right attitude is, well, you’re probably about as flawed as me, and you know we’re lucky that we found each other.

And so let’s see if we can make a commitment because we’re engaging in something that’s very risky, you know, an intimate relationship; and we’re going to commit to each other and see if we can build something of value across time.

And there’s a definite risk in that, but there’s a complement to your partner.

It’s like, well, I think you’re worth making a sacrifice for.

And what’s the sacrifice?

Well, it’s everyone else; it’s a big sacrifice.

And if you don’t see that as a complement, then I don’t think you’re thinking because not only is it a complement, it’s sort of like the ultimate complement.

And maybe you don’t get to have a marriage that works without that complement.

Maybe it’s so difficult to establish a long-term relationship that’s functional that you have to make a walloping sacrifice very early on in the relationship in order for that to even