Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 6: Gender Dynamics and Differences in Men and Women
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


Today's topic is about gender dynamics and biological differences between men and women you ready Dr. Lisle? Sure. All right, in 2005 then president of Harvard, his name is Lawrence Summers He was in a conference and the conference was about gender diversity in the subjects of science and engineering Now over over years there's always been a difference in the amount of males in science, technology engineering and math, there's always been more males there than females and he was discussing these differences and trying to figure out why that was. And he suggested. in his talk, among many other things, and I'm grossly paraphrasing here. but he suggested that males and females have behavioral differences that actually can be explained by a biology rather than socialization. In other words that men and women are different simply because they're men and women not because they were taught to be masculine or taught to be feminine. Of course there's a really big political fallout from this, people on both sides kind of arguing whether or not he was correct and it ultimately was big mess for him. But in terms of what the actual truth is, what do you think Dr. Lisle? Well, first of all, I remember when this happened I can't believe that it's ... did you say 2005? Mm-hm It seems like yesterday to me. I I remember it well, and I remember basically thinking you poor slob I can't believe that that you stuck your foot in us and you know bless you for doing so because He was looking at the same evidence that all of us in the social sciences that are that are aware we're looking at and he was making a comment that is scientifically, utterly completely non-controversial and yet socially it was just death, so that guy lost his job is the head of Harvard University because he had the gall to say something that everybody with a brain can see is true and yet it goes even deeper than that there's a all of the evidence supports him. There are, there are very significant differences between males and females in humans, and when it comes to their psychology There are, of course, there are large overlaps because they're both, you know they're a great ape. They are a big animal that, you know, arose on the African continent over the last couple of million years and they face the same predators in the same landscape and therefore they had to evolve many of the same survival mechanisms, but when it comes to the rest of their psychology. their reproductive psychology, their reproductive psychologies drove differences in human brains, that are just as significant as the differences that you see in human bodies and those differences are quite marked. Take us through that, what's going on there? What's going to be happening? Is that, ah, the problems that males and females faced in the Stone Age, which is just for the benefit of anybody listening the truth of the matter is is that 99.9 percent of all human life was in the Stone Age. So only the very last sliver of the few thousand years have been out of Stone Age But for the vast majority of time that people have been either humans or protohumans, in other words, something very close to a modern human, it has been in a Stone Age environment, so people, people all lived for all time a subsistence level of survival in packs, where they, ah You might not wanna, you may not want to call them a pack because that sounds like they're a mindless wolf that, no they lived in groups and those groups, it was them against the harshness of reality and it was their group of maybe 30 people or 40 people or less or maybe some more in some cases But the males and females within those groups faced remarkably different problems. And so men were were attempting to ascend dominance hierarchies within a group and women were actually speaking out of both sides of their mouth as they observe this process. They were encouraging the males sexually, the ones that would rise in dominance hierarchies they would mate with the different, preferentially with men higher in dominance hierarchies, but at the same time they were a leveling force socially as much as they could, or a cohesive force trying to smooth over the damaged and bruised egos of men who would lose in various competitions. So women are designed by nature to, to be very subtle and cohesive around social issues trying to keep a group together, essentially anticipating anger and conflicts of interest and trying to mitigate the anger and disruption that goes on with an internally competitive situation. You might think of a, of women as if you look / thought of an NBA coach, that they've got, you know 12 big egos all trying to be alpha, everybody wants more shots that everybody wants more points and everybody wants more money But what the coach is trying to get done is trying to get that team to play together as much as they possibly can For the benefit of the whole group And so that coach has to be very talented and intuitive psychologically in order to balance these two processes. So that that is very much how female psychology has come to be the way it looks and male psychology is much more direct, forward and trying to get to the top I remember watching a movie and it was called in my Big Fat Greek Wedding and the man of the house was a, you know big burly male And he was, you know, was trying to be the alpha male of the household and he told his wife during one scene at dinner He said I'm the man of the house I'm the head of the household and you shall treat me like this and the wife just kind of snarky way She said yeah. Well you're the head but I'm the neck so I turn the head wherever it goes Ha, ha, ha, ha. That's beautiful. Yes, good to know. Is that is that we're talking about here? Yeah, sure. in other words they're all trying to angle for resources, in other words the the chief function of life on Earth is to to gather resources in order to utilize those resources in service of gene reproduction. That's fundamentally what's happening? So the the big strong male is an extremely useful device for a female, yeah, for two reasons. Number one they want to pass on big strong genes to their son and they also want to get the benefit of those big strong gutsy muscles in terms of their hunting capabilities ,and their protection capabilities, so it's, so women are looking to try to, they're actually looking for masculine genes and and males are also looking for effeminate genes and and so these two things, are these two timeless methods that the brains have worked themselves into and with it substantial differences in their, in their psychologies. So let's talk a little bit more about the specifics I know you said that the male psychology is more direct and things like that. What's what are some unique differences for males? Well for one thing, males are much more likely to be explosive, angry and violent than females. Males actually have a particular hormone called dihydrotestosterone that when they get angry, that this, this acts like a supercharged, supercharged, ah testosterone and so what it does is it fires males up and puts them in a position where they effectively feel that they are all in on a game, on a game where there is, ah, where there's potential violence involved. Females don't have this or if they have it, they have it in massively smaller quantities. It's just Males, for example the average male in the United States will analyze his fighting ability about three times a week Strangely enough the the most common amount of time that female will analyze her fighting ability in her lifetime is zero. So there will be ... We're talking about physical or are we talking about ... yes ... intellectual or emotional Physical fights. So most females rarely analyze their fighting abilities, where most males analyze their fighting abilities three times a week. So... Tell that to my sister, ha, ha, ha Yeah I barely You are vaguely aware of it, that if you are for example I might walk into a gas station and I'm going in there to possibly pay gas bill. So I give the guy $20 and in there is a couple of fairly rough looking customers not super rough looking, they're just there to buy potato chips and beer but the point is that I'm looking at them and I'm analyzing their size and I'm thinking through the situation if this gets violent this is not the typical life that a female human being lives in and so, it's not that they can't if they've been assaulted that may change things or if they've seen assaults that may change things or if they just may have been threatened But the point is is that the average female literally, is is not living inside the same quasi violence filled brain as goes on inside of a human male So what are some differences in a female? They are, for one thing, they are on average they're quite a bit nicer and so with that with the less testosterone females are inherently friendlier and inherently more motivated to keep the peace The this doesn't mean that females aren't very crafty Remember that they may be very nice, but they're all still trying to compete for the top males and so there they are still in sexual competition with one another. And so there's still, there's still some clever dynamics, intersectional dynamic, that go on with females competing with each other. They don't tend to like the competition, in other words they're sort of a, they are little bit frustrated and resentful that the males will even put them in that position But the truth is is that they've got to be in that position. There's no way around it whereas males are a little more straightforward about the fact that they're competing with each other very directly for for female attention and favour. And so the females are just a little slicker, a little more subversive. The knives aren't quite as sharp, is basically what's going on. Why are females less direct about their competitive status in the mating game? What they are in general is they're in general friendlier. Remember what they're up to. What they're, they are, they're trying to compete with each other as ferociously as possible to get as high on the mating food chain as they can get but at the same time they are trying to keep the pack together. If a pack comes apart, because the mating dynamics get too too volatile, then the females really lose big because they've got a child or two and they are they're vulnerable to - for example, a pack on the other side of the river. So if our pack has say 23 people in it and some of them are little children and we've got eight men and eight women and So we've got eight men that are basically the protectors of our entire pack If, if there's too much conflict of interest between those males over a given female or two - if those females aren't intuitive enough to smooth that thing out and not allow that boat to rock they could have those ... the pack could get split in half and if it gets split in half, they are, they're in danger of being overrun and raped and basically etc, Being being wiped out by a bigger pack that has cohesion and so it appears that human packs would run probably as big as 150 and So you really didn't want to be the member of a small back that was a vulnerable place and female psychology appears to have been essential in trying to keep those packs together, that that's where you'll hear about, you know the people pleasing, the conflict avoidance, the ah peacemaker. This is where this all comes from. It isn't that males don't have those characteristics. They just don't have them in the same quantities as females do. Would you say that males who exhibit these type of characteristics, are they, do they just have less testosterone? Or are they, I guess, more feminine, I mean what's the, what's the deal with that? Yeah, yeah, they're, they've got less testosterone. Yeah, I'm undoubtedly a Testosterone isn't the only variable that's involved here, but on average that's exactly what it is that you're saying Testosterone is a pretty is a causal agent and therefore a pretty strong correlate of male aggressive behavior And for females who are I guess more? More direct and less peacekeeping do they just have more testosterone or less estrogen? yes, the what's going on here is testosterone to estrogen ratios and so for example males have a testosterone-estrogen ratio, I think that seven times more concentrated in testosterone than females, something of that nature, the um, that doesn't mean that she won't get some pretty tough females along the way and that they have plenty of testosterone in there. So they, and it's a fascinating study was done 50 years ago by a guy named McGargie, who, who set up experiment, a social psychological experiment that had males and females, being paired together to do a task, where I think they had to do some report They were going to report to the group on their task I do not remember the details of this but what he did was he he was trying to look for the dynamic between males and females when it came to taking charge and So he had, I believe what he had was four combinations. So he had dominant male / dominant female paired together then, he had a dominant male, passive, you know passive female or submissive female. Then he would have submissive male / dominant female and submissive male / submissive female and strikingly in every single case the male was the dominant figure. So even in submissive male / dominant female the male was the one that theoretically took the lead but what happened was is that the dominant female basically shoved him into it and made him be Pushed him into sort of being the Alpha of that situation But in all in all other situations, it very quickly Became dominant, the male became dominant which would have been as some people would say well, that's 1960s and it wouldn't happen now, but I think that these are basically If they if someone were to redo the study now, I think they would probably find exactly the same thing. But these are fundamentally pretty you know, pretty solid [characteristic] of human nature. A few years ago, there was a writer who was curious about the differences in males and females and she was a writer who who kind of grew up believing that that little boys are little boys because the parents give them trucks to play with and little boys are taught to stare at a woman when she walks past them and that girls are girls because they're given, you know, the color pink and dresses and Barbie dolls So she did an experiment and she was injected the same amount of testosterone as a regular adult 20 - 25 year-old male and in her blog about this she describes the feeling she had when an attractive woman walked by her and it was all she could do to control herself to not turn her head and stare at the body when the woman walked by and After she was done with her experiment. She said she never got it until that moment that why she was so upset when men would would try really hard not to look at that at certain things and then and they just couldn't help themselves you know, yeah, that's a very strange story and I I don't think I would believe it unless maybe she's a lesbian, because She actually is. Now that makes sense So yeah There would be nothing about injecting testosterone into a female that would cause them to look at females The but yes if she's a if she's a lesbian then then yes the greater amount of testosterone Testosterone is a huge driving force of sexuality. And so And this is this is where the ratio of textually the ratio of testosterone and estrogens will sort of tell the story and yes, so she upped her ratio testosterone considerably and Suddenly she was much ,is going to much enhance her her her sexual Force in her psychology and there you had it. There you go turning left Yep, what's covered? Look till they're gone. Yeah Of course, none of us do this obviously. I Didn't look at the lady next door as out the window every time she walked by in front of our house. Nope. No you'd never that would be rude. God I was 8. She was old. She was old lady. She was about 29 years old yeah, so Lady was a 29 year old "10". The Stone Age village kind of looks like this and you've got these females competing for the top males and the males all competing with each other for the for the dominating right? I always just assumed that because males can mate so many times and their sperm is essentially very cheap compared to the amount of eggs that that a woman can produce over her lifetime I think it's something like 400 eggs and then for men it's you know, probably in the millions billions or trillions That the females will just all go to the top male no matter what Yes that That is, turns out not to be the case. And the reason is is that In our species now just do to be clear here. That is exactly what happens in 97% of mammalian species. So there's about 4,000 mammalian species and about 3,900 of them exactly, what you're describing is exactly what takes place. The females all go to the very top males who the very top male has no conception of female beauty every female is equally attractive and he's going to service every one of them that comes and the the females are the ones that evolved evolved equipment for detecting differences between the males in terms of their attractiveness. So it has been it is the females that first evolved the concept of beauty not males now in our species What happened was the following and it has happened a hundred times and mammals? You know 100, 100 current mammals to do this and that is that instead of so in in the original situation, what's happening is that but the females are, all, all that they are going to get from the top male is DNA They're not going to get anything else. There's no commitment. No resources. No No, diamond rings nothing. Not not even a cheap onyx ring. Nothing will happen. Hey They're not gonna let the claw to help that female. All they are is grandstanding and mating This is rock star behavior So this is actually we call this a he-man strategy So throughout nature the he-man strategy is in fact the most common mating strategy that you're going to see on earth Now it's going to turn out that in certain species Where it turns turns out to be valuable to do a great deal of provisioning of offspring You're going to find out that the he-man strategy Has a competitive strategy which is going to be what we're going to call pair bond strategy or human beings call it love or true love strategy And that is that the females are going to try to find The best male they can find who will also commit a great deal of resources to her and her offspring And so this is this is what has happened in in human life from the last two million years prior to two million years ago protohumans lived the he-man strategy but starting about two million years ago that changed and we have clear evidence that humanoids Became pair bond strategy reproducers and that gave rise to males then evolving for the first time preferences for females So if you're going to commit to one female or one female at a time, at least, what you're going to do is, you're going to start to be very discriminating for the first time. So Modern females are all twisted up about how discriminating males are about female beauty However, it was in fact females discriminating over male beauty that started it started the whole thing. Today we have mutual high discrimination in in humans between both males and females are highly discriminating and the difficulty that people have in finding romantic relationships is that the people on the other side of the fence, on the other side of the trade are highly discriminating and it's very difficult to get two sides happy about a deal. It seems to me that the desire for commitment doesn't really come up until a few dates in. Whose idea, I guess whose idea was that as you know, I have friends on both sides. I have guy friends who date women and they don't really have the talk about relationships until way down the line and then they say oh, you know I'm not really looking and then I have a girl female friends who on the other side they're kind of like hoping that that that the guy will commit to them And then that is just kind of it's a big mess nowadays It seems to me that with the availability of social media and that the, you know the very easy to online dating platforms. This becomes a bit more challenging to differentiate what exactly we are looking for - everybody knows what's going on. Yeah, these are these are ancient Stone Age problems. This is basically This reminds me of young children Learning to play blackjack or poker for the first time and as they learn you know that three kings is a good hand they're all excited when they get three kings and so You look at a 12 year old that's relearning this game and you and they're all excited about this and they then they discover bluffing And they think that this is just you know This wonderful new new thing in life when the truth is they've been playing poker for a hell of a long time and so in the same way this very same game has been going on for two million years and the game is this Women are out to get the fanciest male genes that they can possibly get But they want them under the conditions where the male is going to commit to them Now they may be willing to take those great genes without any commitment because they could then pass on Superlative genes to their sons who could make use in the next generation of the very same Characteristic that sometimes females are willing to take on males that are extremely attractive with no Without provisioning them. So the grand prize of nature for humans is a an Extremely attractive male because an extremely attractive male can mate basically indiscriminately with high quality Females and not put out any any commitment energy. So an extremely attractive male might sire You know five thousand children in a lifetime Possibly probably wouldn't because pregnancy rates are not that high per population in humans. So The but they damn well might sire a couple hundred would be very probable and a highly attractive male, so that that is one one thing that can so remember the female in her head is Looking for the fanciest thing that she can get her hands on However, she understands that the fanciest thing that she'd get her hands on is not going to commit to her in all probability So the so what she's looking for is to split the difference between think of a think of a woman with two options on her hands She's got you know, Errol Flynn on the one hand that slept with everything in the world Who would if he impregnated her her child would be fancier than herself on the other hand she can go with Horace the bank teller who's a dweeb, and yet Horace follows her around and Worships the ground she walks on and Horace is never going to look at another woman Even when that woman walks by and nobody's watching him. He's he's so intimidated by his mate's superiority that he is is transfixed into being her slave. Okay So let's just think about those two opposite poles. So where does the woman want to land? she wants to land a little closer to Errol Flynn than the Horace, the excitement comes With the fancy male and the the safety comes with the dough male and she's looking to hit / split the difference between these two To get the very most exciting male. She can get her hands on that will also commit. So she evolves mechanisms To try to detect commitment cues out of males. Males have evolved techniques to try to Charm their way past the females ability to detect commitment cues. So the males have learned to lie And the females have learned to detect the lying and this is an evolutionary arms race between male and female on this dimension So when people are meeting today Everybody knows what the game is. Okay that the male if he's attracted to the female he would like to sleep with her Pretty much as fast he can. now if it turns out that that male is Essentially playing one of two mating strategies if he finds her attractive He is either playing He-Man strategy, at which point he would sleep with her But he wants to have absolutely no energy and commitment involved, he's not, doesn't want to commit any resources to her Or he's playing pair bond strategy where he's willing to commit the rest of the resources of his life to her so at first meet that male isn't sure what he's up to and We believe that sometimes he knows. In other words, very often the male knows that this woman is not pair bond material She's not fancy enough, for him, males are willing to sleep down In response to the opportunity for casual mating. The males want to sleep up when it comes to a pair bond strategy The exact opposite is true of females. These are the mirror images of each other The the the human female will only sleep up in response to casual mating strategy situations She is willing to sleep down For pair of on considerations. That's because a pair bond can be not as fancy as her in terms of sexiness But he's going to bring resources to the table to even it out And so this is this is really a two factor equation that is being played Over and over again in human genetics. It is resources and sexiness, or what we're going to call gene quality and that is the dynamic and and everybody knows it. Everybody knows it, but they don't quite put their finger on it. This is why That it is a mathematical certainty that most of the people that you are interested in will never be interested in you and It and it is why most of the people that are interested in you you will never be interested in you. This is true if if you are a "2", the "1's" are really interested in you and the "3's" are not interested in you, if You're a five. The fours are really interested in you and the sixes or not and all the way up and down the chain Everybody faces the same constraints except the people in the top two or three percentile and they are in a unique situation where most of the people that they are interested in are also interested in them they live Remarkable lives relative to the rest of us and I hate them all I only hate the males. If the people that we are attracted to are likely never going to be attracted to us and vice and vice versa How do we find happiness in the mating dance? Well, it isn't that it isn't but it can't happen. It just means it's statistically not likely to happen so in any given in other words most of the people that That a given let's take a given guy Who's a six so he's 60th percentile, so he's but better slightly better looking than average this guy is going to be interested in a lot of people that are north of him on the food chain and so it's going to be the case that They because they can see what he is and they know what they are Most of them are not going to be interested in him. So but that isn't going to be true a hundred percent of the time once in a while Somebody's going to take a shine to him that is north of him, and there's a good chance he'll be interested back. So there is that dynamic percolates around inside the system This is going to be what I call the subjectivity within the objectivity. In other words sexiness. I can remember I Can remember reading the classic book that educated the world's biologists about the nature of reality. It's called The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins It was written in 1976 and I didn't read it till a second edition came out in in 1989 and when I read when I read this there was a shocking statement sitting right in there in that book, very unapologetically as you'd expect that a theoretical biologist Where Dawkins is talking point-blank and openly about the critical importance of sexual attractiveness. Nothing, like this was anywhere in the world of psychology and I had a PhD in the field and yet here was a biologist simply Saying look, this is where all the action is so the and of course everybody's terrified of the fact that Sexual attractiveness is highly subjective. So from the time were little kids everybody's saying oh everybody's beautiful there's a cover for every pot and essentially that is all like, you know, it's all subjective and This is like just entirely bullshit and everybody knows it So the the the political correctness and fear about calling a spade a spade in this arena is staggering and and yet You know the world the world gives lip service to it because somehow it's not nice to to talk the way that I'm talking But it is the way it is and there is tremendous objectivity and sexual attractiveness When it comes to facial attractiveness the correlation coefficients between any two raters looking at faces on a on a scale of Dimensions from the first percentile to the 99th percentile. The correlation coefficients are about 0.94 in other words They're almost perfect Okay There's almost perfect agreement between any two raiders now you and I know that that's not true because you and I have We have looked at pairs of people and you and I will discrete it from time to time. But so 0.94 is not perfect, but it's close Okay, so would never be the case that I'm looking at somebody that I'm calling them a nine and you're looking at some you're looking At that same person and you're calling them a six that will never happen Right, but I can be around somebody who maybe you might call a nine or a ten or something and they might be facially attractive but they're they're they're really Argumentative they're not really pleasant to be around. They're rude. They they smell bad, you know all these things I can't believe that it's just gene mutations that play here It there's also gene variances that's involved So what we're seeing is the following there when it comes to human mating It's it's there's an awful lot of factors It's fundamentally genes and resources. However that what the quote genes are and remember for example When you think about personality dimensions super important? in fact the most attractive personality dimension in the world for men and women both is Agreeableness that winds up being the number one thing that is sought by mates worldwide. Now, let's think about why that is the reason why that would be true would be because resource sharing and willingness to be generous with resources including your own time and energy And to be sensitive to conflicts of interest over resources which is are going to include time and energy are going to be critical features of a pair bond that is going to face an awful lot of Difficulties across child-raising and so it turns out that that you know what you might not think As a resource a question is Okay. So agreeableness is actually is a resource question That that human preferences are trying to ferret out So yes, it isn't just the way somebody looks that that is determines their attractiveness It's going to turn out that Our attraction to people is going to be is going to wind around different neural circuits So for example lust circuits are going to be in response to body body characteristics whereas Attraction to their to who they are as a person Will wind up being different circuits. Now these circuits can They can they can all of them can result in people being more and less exciting or pleasant to be with sexually and to be physically close with but they that they appear to have evolved at different times in human natural history and they have and they have different characteristics to what it is that it feels like so you can be Drawn and attracted to someone's smile who you know who they are person and you feel very warmly toward them But you may never feel strongly sexually attracted to them because of the shape of her of her lower body features That she just may not have very attractive Rear-end and legs. And so you may be very attracted to the human and, but not very attracted to her sexually, whereas someone else who you know is just a total bitch is someone that has a physical shape that you always find very attractive? That's because those two those two characteristics Of human experience are actually different neural circuits that evolved under different genes controlling them Would females rather choose a less agreeable male versus a more agreeable male Yes, there's certainly that characteristic So females in general are going to want males that are bigger than they are Stronger than they are and more disagreeable than they are. And the question is how much disagreeable can you stand? before it becomes intolerable and you feel like it's going to get turned on you and So you want to see And it, there are significant individual differences that are involved here So if you if you yourself are an absolute hard-bitten tough testostoronised female You might you might want to wimp. Okay, because you know, you're tough enough to take care of yourself So this is there are there are nuances and individual differences that wind up playing throughout through this game But these are these are definitely some of the some of the pieces to the puzzle here that go on in human romance and man-woman dynamics In terms of agreeable / disagreeable My understanding of this is this is kind of how people feel fair about the relationships almost like it doesn't have to be 50/50 but it has to feel 50/50. So some people are about 55/45 some people about 60/40 Some people are 40/60 and the more disagreeable ones are something like 70/30 in their favor Is that is that what we mean by agreeable and disagreeable? Yeah, that's right That's a very good way to conceptualize that so disagreeable people are tend to be more testosterone-ised and They tend to be less empathic they tend to be less sensitive towards other people's needs because They're they're focused on the fact that in general. They feel like they're getting chiseled And so there's a general irritable quality to them the higher you go up in the disagreeable testosterone chain On the mirror image it's very sweet people just don't want to fight for anything and Concede at the drop of a hat. Those are people on the other side And those are the most most fun people to kind of be in a, enter into any type of relationship, romantic or otherwise? Not necessarily the The thing is is that those people come with their own expenses so let's suppose you you marry some gal is just sweet as anything, but the problem is is that She is being taken advantage of at her workplace, at church, ... she's not, you know, they're asking her to do this and do that and She basically can't say no because she's so agreeable, but she winds up being stretched and overwhelmed by life and so that that impacts you as her mate, so there are the truth of the matter is is that the most adaptive people all things considered are Somewhat near the middle of the the bell curve and as you get as you get either highly disagreeable or highly agreeable Those come with substantial costs that are associated with those, you know, you you are which you are but it's useful to know If you happen to be for example, very agreeable that You know it pays to figure out how to engineer your way around some of those Characteristics so that you don't you don't incur too much expense and dealing with people Yeah, and the reason I'm thinking about this as someone's a little too agreeable and let's say from both sides Let's say it's a female who's kind of, she's not too agreeable I'd say just lower on the bell curve in terms of more agreeable than most people and They're entering into a relationship with the male who they're assuming is going to be committed and they agree and everything but then the male who's sharing some of the resources and ends cheating and ends up getting another mistress and all those kind of mess on the other side? You can have a very agreeable male who is able to commit resources to a very beautiful female and they both have a great relationship Until the baby comes in the male realizes. Oh, guess what? It's not his kid and that the female is actually, you know Been enjoying the company of a more disagreeable, of a higher, I guess, quality male and he's been committing resources. So on both sides How common is this? What's what's the deal in that scenario? This situation is is Very common just as a backdrop in human affairs. This is a percolating, This is a percolating potential that that sits inside of any any relationship, where where things can get tipped out of balance by a variety of factors So we're not going to say this happening all the time everywhere, but it is but it's a percolating low-grade threat that is always there and Be so this is a problem in in any case where people are where the trade is out of balance and someone is being over rewarded. So the the situation could for for an agreeable female can be She can be in relationship with a hard-driving testosterone-ised male, and she can feel Excited and more secure in some ways but that by virtue of his toughness, but that could be a ticking time bomb if it turns out that If it turns out to be the case that he comes upon more resources or comes into situations Where he, where he wants to Essentially play casual mating strategy in life or move on so that is a you know Certainly, these dynamics can happen in any combination But that is a not uncommon thing that happens in in human in human relationships on the other side what happens less frequently but Absolutely is there is that males who are over rewarded in terms of their physical attractiveness with because of their Particularly their modern ability to get resources So you have non-alpha, non-tough males with some brains that in the modern environment wind up being brilliantly rewarded Let's say a guy makes $200,000 a year and the average guy in the United States makes about 40 so our mr. $200,000 a year Really, you know, he can't put a posthole to build a fence end straight but what he can do is you can cut out gall bladders, so he's pretty nifty and He might make five times the what or ten times what the average guy makes and so a a rather Slightly crafty female might be willing to trade down in the looks department ten or twenty percent more than ten percent Let's call it 30. So let's pose our boys a six and she's a nine Now that may work Depends upon what her psychology is like he could be elated that he gets himself a nine and she could be completely fine and that might work, but it might not work and so there's a tendency when relationships are significantly mismatched for them to come apart and and absolutely females in those situations are very often sleeping with the tennis pro and And but this happens they this is this is a potential of what goes on in human life Is there any way to guard against that on the male side and on the female side? Well, I think that ah, you know, I would say that the following is true and This is I mean this is easy to say this You know from it from a psychologist that has been watching this at close range in thousands of people and for three decades So it's may be easy for for me to say this, but if people are honest and and true to themselves and really and really Are really Not letting themselves get giddy over situations but instead Taking their time not rushing into decisions and being square with With the person in the mirror You can sniff a lot of this coming So I have I have observed As Joni Mitchell would say some hot hot blazes that go down to smoke and ash and I could see them coming and I only met these people three times and Yet I could tell this is trouble. This is a mismatched situation there's there is some sort of untoward deal making that's going on here and people are Highly attractive person is being lazy and irresponsible with their wife and trading down Because they're - they're a flake and the less attractive person can see it but is so enamored with getting the good looks but they're going to do it anyway and that this thing is a this thing is a volcano that's going to blow sooner or later and And I've seen it and I've watched it happen and I have seen situations where nice guys have gotten into situations where they really didn't want to be and There might not have been some big mismatch, but they were not happy and They were getting trapped in the females anxiety was that she was damn well determined to drop them And I've seen that situation go on and known that the wrong thing to do was to stay married or and to have children And I've watched those things blow up or just end in long-term Misery, so what can I say? You know what we're seeking, for where we can talk about mating and males and females and testosterone and estrogen and beauty and mutations, but the truth is is that Ideally what people are trying to find is love What they're trying to find is the situation and inherently feels like a very very solid excellent trade And it doesn't feel like quote a trade. It just feels like something that you want to do and the and That possible for people but it is not easy and we wouldn't expect it to be easy It's just in the same way as to find your ideal job and career is not easy it's not easy to find an excellent partner that you might be with for a large portion of your lifetime and however It's not a game for the lazy and it's not a game for those to lack courage It's not a game for the gutless and it's not the game for the impatient. You have to be patient You have to be determined you have to be Make the most of your own self. I have a good friend who said the job here is to Turn yourself in the most perfect mate you can and then act naturally You're not selling anybody anything. You're just being you and the desire to try to get there by shortcuts and to various kinds is the biggest thing that There will keep people between them and a satisfying life in this domain Well said. The important thing is to kind of be the best version of yourself and Strive to achieve your genetic potential in a lot of different ways. You're saying Dr Lisle, that things like keeping in good shape making sure that you're intellectually attractive making sure that you are as attractive as you can be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, all those things All of those things and you know, you can't be this doesn't mean being out of breath with high blood pressure Trying to be as ferociously competitive as possible with every minute of your life. But but it does mean not being lazy and not Overlooking things where we know we're if we put in effort we could put a better foot forward you want to put a very good version of yourself in front of the opposite sex, you don't have All right. Well, thank you again. Dr. LIsle. We'd love to have you come back and talk a little bit more Their dynamics we kind of got off topic talking about dating in love, but I love it. I love this topic It's one of a really interesting topic for me, and we're hoping to get you back here again, maybe to talk about personality characteristics a couple years ago by your recommendation I read a book by Jeffrey Miller called "Spent" talking about all the different personality characteristics that people Have and it boils down to about five plus oh one which is intelligence So we'd love to have you come on and and discuss that and what that means for for different goals that we are trying to accomplish Absolutely great fun, and I look forward to it
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist