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Links
Mads Larsen’s Book: Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder
Mads on Chris Williamson’s channel
Ogden Kraut’s Polygamy in the Bible
Transcript
[00:00] Michelle: Welcome to 132 Problems revisiting Mormon polygamy. I am really excited to bring you this conversation with Mads Larsen. This topic is a little bit off of my beaten path. Um, Maths is doing work on this demographic challenge we have that we are facing being below replacement rate in rates in the West in our reproduction. And there are so many fascinating aspects to this. One of them is the really the persecution he has faced by trying to just even talk about this topic is. Really fascinating. Also, the part of the reason I reached out to him is because of the work he’s done on human mating strategies over time and, and that was really fascinating felt really relevant. We didn’t get into a lot of these topics very in depth in our conversation, so his book is linked in the description box, and I highly recommend following his work, reading his book. I really was interested in this heroic period of our, um, of, of human eve of, I, I guess, looking at the development of. Human mating strategies over time. There is so much to learn that is fascinating. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. I had my mind blown several times as I’m bringing it to you, I would also like to encourage people to please consider donating to this podcast. Please subscribe and share these episodes if they, you find them valuable to you. This is a different topic, but one that I think is extremely important. So thank you, Mads for joining me and thank you all of you. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I am so thrilled to be here with Mads Larsson, who is doing uh work that I find absolutely fascinating, and I’m so appreciative of Mads that you’re willing to come and talk to me. Mats is meeting us from Oslo, so I think it’s 5 o’clock in the morning my time and 1 o’clock in the afternoon, you. Time if that’s right. We wanted to find a window when there was some sunlight because your son’s about to go down in a couple of hours, right? I don’t know, sunlight is
[02:03] Mads Larsen: sunlight is a bold claim, but we do have some daylight for
[02:08] Michelle: go. I’ll take it. Well, the reason I wanted to take talk to Mats, I think he is doing absolutely fascinating research, and I think his voice is extremely important in this time that we’re fitting in. I know that we are coming from somewhat different worlds. I, Mads told me though, I’m sure we’ll talk about this, that you spent time in America, you went to UCLA and you actually have Mormon friends. And so, so this will be a really fun conversation. We’ve, we’ve spoken just a little bit online. And so Maths is working on, I guess, demographic changes throughout time, mating strategies. Are, are you an evolutionary biologist? Why don’t you go ahead and give us an overview of your introduction and then I’ll let, I would love to let people know about your work before we dive into our conversation.
[02:50] Mads Larsen: Yeah, so I’m actually a literary scholar. I use evolutionary theory to analyze literature throughout the ages, uh, to study deep cultural changes. And one of my specialties and uh specialty that I’ve just published a book on is on, uh, mating. How do people mate? How do they, uh, have sex? How do they couple up? How do they start families and how do they reproduce? And, uh, that is the most fundamental aspect of any human community or any community of any orgasms. Uh, and if we do that wrong, if we fail to get reproduction right and we don’t reproduce, we disappear. It’s, it’s the iron law of evolution. So, uh, and also how we, how we may have. Exceptionally strong influence on our societies. To the reason you and I can sit in different parts of the world and speak to each other and talk is because of the West’s first sexual revolution around 1200, when we’ve transitioned from living in polygynous skinship societies to living in uh feudal societies in nuclear families underpinned by lifelong monogamy, and that set us on a new path that created new psychologies that laid the foundation for modernity.
[03:55] Michelle: Oh my gosh, there was so much in what you just said. That’s amazing. So first, let’s talk, let’s tell people about your book, and then we’ll dive into some of this. And so I, um, so Matt, you’ve written one book on this topic you said that has open access. Will you tell us a little bit about that, about your process of writing it and what, um, what people can look forward to reading about.
[04:14] Mads Larsen: So, um, the problem as I see it or the shortcoming of demographers and others working on, on gender or sex or mating or, or this demographic collapse that we’re facing is that they’re very focused on the present. They grew up in a, in a time that is. Stunningly unique in human history. The mating regime we have now, it’s, it’s a complete novelty, and we’ve only had it for about 50 years. Uh, so to understand how we got to where we are today, I had to look at the evolution of human mating, and then I, I, I, I, uh, brought a 6 million year canvas, uh, back to our last common ancestor with chimpanzees when we made it promiscuously. And I take us quickly through that and up to about 800 years ago. And then I analyzed the progression over the past 800 years from antiquities mating ideology of heroic love through medieval courtland companionate love to modern libertine and romantic and confluent love. To better understand how we arrived at where we are today, why digging has become dysfunctional and we’ve stopped uh reproducing at the necessary level in terms of keeping our population numbers. And also look at considering humanating nature, male and female male mate preferences and our historical past. What are the plausible options for the future and what are, what, I of course don’t know how we might solve this, but I, due to my background, I can say something of what, what tactics and politics, policies are less likely to work and what, what might have an effect that is, that is strong enough.
[05:56] Michelle: OK, so, OK, this is the, the, everything you say has so much in it. I know we could talk for a couple of hours about every sentence that you say because all of that development of different mating, mating strategies, I guess throughout time, we could totally dive into that, but what you are leading to is sort of our current. Um, looming potential crisis of demographic collapse, right, that we are not reproducing at replacement rates currently. And so I’m curious to know, do you see, um, I wanna dive into that first just a little bit. Tell me like what areas, what countries or what demographics you’re most concerned about? I assume that Norway, that’s probably where you’re from, like, like how should we be thinking about this? How big of a. Problem is this for us to be thinking about.
[06:45] Mads Larsen: This is a nearly universal problem for the rich world. Um, the only parts of the world that are reproducing their numbers are primarily Africa, the Middle East, and a few countries further east. Across the other parts of the world, uh, we’re below 2.1, which is replacement level. Norway, for instance, the, the fertility rate is 1.4. That means that every generation will be reduced in size by 13. So in only 3 generations, the cohort size will have went from 100 to 30. So we lease, so in 3 generations, we will have lost 70% of the children. And this creates a very old and aging population, fewer workers, and in a technologically static world, which we don’t have, but, if we were to live in the same world as we live in now, this would mean, unless we’re able to do something about fertility rates. That we will simply self eradicate. We will know our societies will no longer be a part of the world, and the world will be taken over by those parts of the world where they still reproduce. That’s just, uh, it’s, it feels so abstract that fertility and reproduction shouldn’t be so central. But and the changes are so slow that it’s hard for us to relate to them. But as we have another 1.4, it means self eradication within not too many generations.
[08:07] Michelle: So when you’re measuring a generation, is that 20 years? How, how are you thinking about a generation? I guess that there’s older, um, reproductive age, is that 30 years, 40 years, like, like, tell us how you’re thinking about
[08:19] Mads Larsen: generations. Yeah, uh, in, in Norway, um, women have on average, the first child in their early 30s, so generational length has, uh, increased.
[08:29] Michelle: OK, OK, so, and I guess the reason it’s hard to um process this for a lot of people is, you know, human life 70 years, 80 years, that’s only about two generations that we are really aware of so it’s, it’s hard for us to, I think it’s hard for us as humans to think beyond our lifespan, right? Is that part of why this is hard for people to wrap their minds around and to actually think about in productive ways?
[08:56] Mads Larsen: Uh, that’s one element. I don’t think it’s, it’s the main hindrance to taking this challenge seriously. You also have unfortunate ideological aspects, uh, Uh, I, when I wrote an, an, an article about this topic last year. Uh, it exploded on Twitter, but interestingly, but it was very interesting where in the world this people cared about this. So within two weeks, my article had become among the 0.3% of all research outputs who generated the most public engagement, and that was almost exclusively in the Spanish-speaking part of Twitter. So it seems like people from a Catholic cultural background had different intuitions for the importance of reproduction. And uh just uh on a related uh stream now I am on your podcast. You’re a Mormon. Two days ago I was on I was on a Catholic podcast. So I mean it’s some people have a culture that That makes them attuned to the importance of this while in Scandinavia, which is a, a, a very secular feminist Protestant culture and I support that fully. I’m programmed by that culture myself. I share it. Uh. Saying that women need to have children in order for our community to exist in the future sounds misogynistic. And in the, I, I was able to spur this debate this summer and it, it, it raged on quite intensely for several months and the personal attacks and the vitriol and on towards me was, was fairly predictable because I understand the culture. But people in our cultures don’t want to talk about this. It feels like I’ve been accused of, um, I mean, I’m a feminist leftist like all Scandinavians, but because I bring up this topic, I’m being accused of being right wing, being a racist, being a misogynist. And it’s, it’s just, it’s a difficult, painful subject for people to to to relate to. Across the world, but especially in cultures like mine because we have the background we have and, and, and it shouldn’t be that way. I mean, Norway is perhaps arguably the most feminist country in the world, and I consider the fertility crisis to be, it should be the primary battleground for all feminists. The countries in the world that are not reproducing. are generally countries where women are free. For the first time in human history, we’ve created societies where women can make their own partner choices and have equality with men. That is half of the job. We’ve completed this in, in a historical almost, you could say miraculous way. The societies we created a specialist getting in NavVR. are very favorable towards women. But if we make that large of a cultural change, and we’re not able to maintain reproduction, our societies will disappear, then your freedom will, in hindsight, appear to have been an experimental uh. Dead end. I mean, if we like the societies we have now, if we want women to be free and to make their own choices, we also have to reproduce. That’s unfortunately the reality of it.
[12:14] Michelle: Yeah, OK, so I have, I have two different different directions I really wanna go. So maybe we’ll start. I want, I want to talk sort of about our, um, like human’s history of pair bonding, how we came to be pair bonded, how we, you know, that, that part of it. But let’s first since we’re on this topic, let’s talk about the current situation right now because as I’ve been thinking about this since encountering, I mean, of course we’ve been hearing about the demographic winter for years and I think it is interesting how. People who value reproduction like Mormons, Catholics, you know, um, we do seem to be more interested in this topic than the average, um, you know, than than just more liberal Western society which I think is interesting and I also, it just, I’m so sorry that you have experienced that all of that vitriol. I relate to it a bit, but what is so surprising to me is that if we are a mature society, we shouldn’t, um, we shouldn’t like. You know, throw a fit about just hearing the truth. That’s really surprising to me. It’s not that people are saying, are pushing back and saying, oh, I think you’re wrong, maths because of this and this and this. They’re saying, you can’t say that. Don’t say that. I don’t want to hear that is how it sounds to me. So we are unwilling to look at just scientific truths that we could potentially do something about, or, or at least consider what they mean. Instead, we just say that must not be said. I want to put my head in the ground and hide from it. Is that the experience you’re having?
[13:36] Mads Larsen: Yeah, and the strange part, these are, are the leading researchers on demography in Norway saying it and the people working in the finance department as the experts on this topic, they insist that they’ve just agreed with themselves that we’re not allowed to portray this low fertility as negative. Uh, which creates frustrating cognitive dissonance. But yeah, in terms of what you’re saying, oh, that’s not at all my place to borrow. Those are not my expectations to my fellow humans. That’s, uh, that’s an enlightenment utopia, and, uh, unfortunately or fortunately, I don’t know what it would be like. We don’t live in that world. Um, that is generally how debates unfold and if we’re going to take this debate, which is the most, I would say. Arguably the most important debate of our era. We’re steering towards self eradication and, uh, it’s kind of legitimate to say that the West has had a good run, but we’ve lost our appetite for continued existence. So let’s just enjoy the generations that are left and then leave the world to someone else. But if that is what we’re going to do, if we are going to commit this collective Suicide as, as, as communities, we should at least have a conversation about it first and, and see if, if, if this is really what we want to do, or if we want to start talking about the problem, taking it with the seriousness that it deserves, start experimenting with solutions and see if we over time can create cultural change, new ideology of love again. I mean, the one we have, it’s uh. It’s, uh, it’s we’ve, we’ve only, it’s only been hegemonic for about half a century, which it’s it’s a very short time, but I’m, I’m predicting that with the technologies that are coming from the 4th industrial revolution with AI, um, automation, gene hacking, artificial wombs, we’re gonna go to what I would call the 4th, the West 4th sexual revolution, which will be a new mating regime and we need to start talking about this, how we can create this new reality that we’re moving towards, so that we can adapt culturally to our new environment.
[15:30] Michelle: OK, so, OK, so I do have a couple of questions. I have, for me as a woman, so I don’t know if you know, I have a large family. I have many children, and it’s, it’s foreign to me, honestly, to relate to People not wanting children, not valuing children so I wanted to understand that a little bit better and I, and I’m curious it sounds to me like from what you you’re saying now and what I’ve heard you say on other podcasts that you are thinking the only way out is forward to this new future that frankly to me sounds terrible like either either going to a place where we don’t have West. values of freedom and equality and and we instead go to a more um not a more backward society where those things aren’t valued but they have more children right? or um or going into this AI potential nightmare I mean who knows what that will do for human flourishing and for well-being individual well-being. So I’m curious to know, um, well, a couple of things because you do say women have to have children, and that’s misogynistic. And I guess I’m curious about that attitude. I’d like to, to understand that a little more and dig into it because to me, it’s couples need to have children. I still think, I think that we are a pair bonding species and that, um, that’s, that’s the idea. Deal you know and that um really children childhood children should be an equal investment between men and women and I’ve as I’ve been thinking about how my society, my community is set up to value and facilitate children I just wanted to know like is there any chance that you see of sort of a um. Resurgence of something a little bit more traditional rather than just going to the AI revolution. I’m curious about your thoughts on that. Like, is there a possibility? Because what, from my perspective, my, um, life is very happy, you know, I really like this ideology. It, it has served us. Very well, we have so much joy in our family. I’ve loved being a mother, even though it is a lot of work. My husband has loved being a father. We have a more traditional lifestyle. I’m just curious if there is, do people just see this as so, um, backward in a way that they can’t even conceptualize that there could be something of value in this in this perspective.
[17:39] Mads Larsen: Yeah, I know, uh, the, the stereotype of Mormons is, uh, annoyingly happy and successful. I don’t, people look at Mormons and, and find it suspicious. And of course, this doesn’t apply to all Mormons, just the ones I know and the ones you see in the media. But yeah, they do everything wonderful and these big families and everything works and everybody’s happy and everyone’s great. So yeah, they don’t generally people don’t look at that and think, yeah, we should be Mormons and it’s they, why do they smile all the time. Uh, but aside, but aside from that, yeah, so the thing is we’re now facing an existential threat and we have many different communities, different cultural legacies and different communities will due to this legacy and happenstance be drawn to different experiments and solutions. Uh, I consider there to be a negligible, uh, chance in Norway for us returning to more traditional, uh, Male-female relations in our previous uh regime of romantic love from the early 1800s to the 1960s, uh, the ideology imposed that men and women were incomplete halves who through finding their other half, uh, could enter into a pair bond of, uh, lifelong monogamy underpinned by strong feelings of emotion and then self-realized to the, uh, breadwinner housewife model. Uh, we have. No love for that in Norway and Scandinavia today. Uh, we are appalled, uh, by people who suggest that could be a good idea for women to stay home with the, with children. Um, so those are, that is not among the the window of that, that does not exist within the window of opportunity that we have in Scandinavia. But you see other places in the world, um, some countries are, are. are restricting, uh, reproductive rights for women, perhaps partially inspired by low fertility, uh, and I think in some countries certainly you will see a return to more traditional family forms as, as, as an attempt to get fertility rates back up. Uh, pretty sure certain Scandinavia will not experiment in that direction. Our highest value is female freedom and we define female freedom. As, uh, pursuing a career, uh, while also having children, and if the children get in the way, uh, you prioritize the career. That’s the Scandinavian way. And then that’s how I feel too. I was programmed by this. I’m not saying it’s a good idea. I’m not saying that this is a model for emulation. This is just what I grew up with and these are cultural and political emotions that were programmed into me. So I would not advocate. From Norway returning to the more traditional family forms, I would rather that Norway would commit to the path we’re on now and see if this Norway, our contribution could be to see if there’s a way we can solve this problem without restricting what we consider women’s freedoms. And then other countries will experiment with other things, and we will see what works and then we can perhaps in the future learn from each other or just have some communities disappear while others don’t.
[20:45] Michelle: OK, OK, so yeah, I wanna stay on this topic for a minute because I do feel like in some ways it’s hard to even share a mindset because when I’m asking my question, I’m not talking in any way about limiting women’s freedoms or making any anything like that. I guess my um what. No,
[21:01] Mads Larsen: I, I totally understand your, your mindset and perspective, uh, but your mindset and perspective isn’t understood by the Scandinavian mindset and perspective. I mean, I’ve, I’ve lived in the US, uh, I I’ve traveled extensively across the world. I’ve, I’ve known people with so many different mindsets that I find it fairly straightforward, a lot of the time, at least to put myself in their shoes in terms of thinking and how they view the world. But then I also understand why Scandinavians would consider. Uh, what, what you consider not to take freedom from women, Scandinavians would consider misogynistic and a way of taking freedom away from women because freedom is a word that anybody, uh, defines any which way they prefer.
[21:43] Michelle: Right, so, so that’s, that’s what I’m wanting to, um, just, just stick on for a little bit longer is this idea that motherhood is an antithetical to women’s happiness and to women’s freedom. That is, that is so um. Foreign to me and you know because as a woman who does really love motherhood I’m curious why there is this mindset that views motherhood as somehow like not good for women and um you know is it just a matter of the pregnancy or that like like what is that that um and why why when when we are so focused on self-actualization and happiness and we do understand that struggle is required for happiness like I, I rarely hear people. Say, oh, it’s so unfair that women have to work and have to have a career and have to um sacrifice to have a successful career and they have to get up every day and they have to get an education and and that’s viewed as liberation while the idea that you would have a child is views viewed as backward bondage. It’s, it’s like, like that is very foreign to me. I consider myself very privileged to have had the opportunity to raise my children and um you you know, so why is it viewed as sort
[22:57] Mads Larsen: of.
[22:59] Michelle: bondage and slavery rather than a privilege.
[23:03] Mads Larsen: Yeah, so there’s, there’s two things I want to touch on there. Firstly, it’s not considered the way you describe it. Motherhood is considered very positive in, in Scandinavia as well. Uh, women should absolutely have children. It’s a great source of joy. It helps your self-realization. If you want to, so it’s up to the woman. If she wants to have children, it’s great, and then if a woman doesn’t want to, that’s perfectly fine. So it’s not that mother is bad, it’s just a question of individual preference. And, and in the Scandinavia we strongly promote children and families. We want that too. Uh, the reason why career and, um, and self-realization professionally is so important and perhaps more important than motherhood. Is, uh, can be traced back to Martin Luther. So this the Nordic countries are the world’s only, uh, Lutheran countries, while your country, um, America is in the Calvinist tradition, and another, uh, Protestant strain, and, and one of the main distinctions there that have strongly shaped the difference between our societies in the Nordic countries and say the US is the view of work. Uh, work in itself. And nobles and it is a very important way to self-realize and to contribute to your community. So even rich people should work just to contribute to others and then that, I mean, Martin Luther was quite a misogynist, but we were thinking around work with when feminism came around in the Lutheran countries, translated into women also having to work and, and the consequence of that is that Scandinavian countries. Have the strongest female labor force participation, much higher than for instance in the US. And this contributes to why we are among the richest societies in the world, because women also, uh, contrite, they don’t work as much as men, but compared to other countries, it’s a lot more equal in that participation. So it’s just the premise of important of contributing through your labor, your entire life has a much higher position due to a Lutheran past compared to your Calvinist background.
[25:11] Michelle: Oh, OK, this is really interesting. So I’m sorry I don’t, I don’t wanna, um, I hope it’s not annoying to you if I keep asking questions about this because I do have a couple of questions. First of all, if women are not tending to be, to have children, I’m curious about why they have lower labor force participation even in Norway. And then my other question is if um as as you describe it that it is viewed as a cultural um the way to contribute to culture that’s encouraged and important is in the labor force why is it not um also that the the what is needed in culture. Is contributing in the labor force in terms of care um child care and I and I don’t think it needs to be either male or female just valuing child like a parent providing child care. Why is that not given any value when it would contribute so much to a society.
[26:05] Mads Larsen: It is given exceptional value in some extent. We have uh among the world’s highest maternity and maternity leaves. Extremely generous of public benefits for parents, for childcare, subsidized daycare, free education, free healthcare. So our social democracies have created what I would say without a doubt, is the best material foundation for having children. You could say human history, but that’s comparing apples and oranges. So let’s, let’s at least say in the modern world. So we do value it tremendous. Sleep and we’ve built an economic foundation for reproduction that from a logical perspective, if you, if we were reasonable beings, you would think that this would be the golden age of reproduction. We are so rich, we’ve made it so maturely easy to have children compared to all other ages that we should not be popping out children like popcorn. But instead, We’re having fewer and fewer of them. And an important aspect there is you, you’re focusing on How people don’t want to have children. That is an element, but that element is probably quite small. The ideological so earlier times, there was a strong ideological imposition on us to reproduce, to start a family, be married and reproduce. That is drastically weakened, but people still want to reproduce and the numbers there are that Norwegian women want 2.4 children, but they’re only having 1.4. So things are getting in the way of their pair bonding and therefore also down the line, their reproduction. And there’s an element once they pair bond and decide to have children that maybe some are ideologically dissuaded from having children, but that seems to be of not so large an importance.
[28:00] Michelle: OK, so there’s actually a crisis within a crisis where women are not, um, having the life that they want. I think, I think it’s quite a painful thing for women to want children and not be able to have them and oh, I can’t remember the, um, and maybe you will remember the man who does the work that he has done the work on the lower fertility rate and I think the assumption is that women who would have had 2.4 children are now having 1.4 instead, but what has been. Um, what it, what it’s looking like is like, you know, the women who are having children are still having the same number of children, but many more women are who do want children are not able to have children, do not have that opportunity, which is really, um, sort of a lifelong tragedy because it, um, having children we don’t. I mean I don’t think many of us have children thinking about our future and our old age and our you know like what’s going to happen to us as um grandparents without grandchildren but that is um something to think about that continues to play out in this tragedy for say a woman who wants children and isn’t able to have them and then as an older person is just alone and who knows how they’re being taken care of right? so it really does seem like. Uh, so, so what I’m hearing you say is that there are women who want children who aren’t able to have them, and I want to kind of drill down on that why that might be. But at the same time, if you talk about this, this is seen as misogynistic and anti-feminist. So I’m curious there’s there’s,
[29:26] Mads Larsen: yeah, there’s an important aspect there though that, uh, in, in Norway, there are 3 times as many men who are involuntarily childless as there are women. So, um, Women to some extent recycle the most attractive mates in the form of temporal polygyny, uh, where they have, uh, where a man will, will have children with a woman, then move on to the next woman have children with her, and so forth. So there’s 3 times as many men as women in Norway who, who do not have children against their will. So that’s also an important factor. But what drives this? One of the main drivers of low fertility in the modern world is, is people’s problems with with finding a pair. And one perspective on it that I believe is is quite valuable to explore because within that, that is probably where we first should start looking for solutions. Uh, and that is that women find an increasing number of men not to be good enough. So, uh, and this is very predictable considering our, our, our evolutionary history, that with the environment we created now it’s. We would expect women to raise their demands for a potential partner in a way that makes it hard to form pair bonds because there’s very, with a shrinking number of men who are considered good enough for women. There will of course be fewer and fewer couples that, so what we see with modern dating and, and especially enhanced by apps like Tinder is that an increasing number of the meeting opportunities, that is through dating and sex, are channeled toward a very small proportion of the most attractive men. While the, while the, the, the men with lower mate values get fewer and fewer mating opportunities, fewer dates, fewer opportunities to have sex, uh, and if, I mean, with modern mating, that’s what we call the short-term market, the, the date. and sleeping around, that is the entry point to the long-term market. So if, if, if women are depriving themselves of the opportunity to expose themselves to men with similar mate value and instead go on dates with men that are much more attractive than they are, then pair bonding is an unlikely result because in monogamous machines, uh, humans mate assortatively. We tend to pair up with someone of similar mate value as, as we are. Um, And with that dysfunction on on dating markets, women. Send a very long time trying to find a partner, they might not find one or they find one so late in life, um, that the reproductive window is shortened.
[32:00] Michelle: OK, so the demographic problem is downstream from the dating and the pairing and the mating problem. It’s so
[32:07] Mads Larsen: that’s actually that is, that is one of the elements and it’s one of experts agree that this is a one of the main drivers. And I would say that this is a particularly interesting element because it’s, it’s one that we can understand, we, we understand why it’s this way, and there are perhaps interventions we can agree on, to experiment with, to see if there’s another way of dating that can expose women to men that they can actually end up being pair bonded with. Uh, of course, many other things play in, but this is the main one. And it’s something we, we perhaps can do something about other things like urbanization, affair of the future, a different mating ideology as I mentioned. Those are also impactful, but there’s no, there’s no government that can say we’ve just decided that we now have a new mating ideology, but we can do something about our dating format and try to facilitate. The good thing here is that it is a win-win situation. Men and women want to be pair bonded. They tend to be happier when they are pair bonded. And we simply didn’t evolve to spend years and years and years of our life looking for Mr. and Mrs. Right. Uh, we all human societies until the modern times, we’ve had arranged marriages with different extent of parental influence. So we’re in a brand new regime of individual choice, and we’ve only had it universalized for about half a century, and these processes usually take, they can take several centuries to complete. So we just haven’t found a way to reconcile this new. Uh, mating regime of confluent love with reproduction, and the main issue there is How can we make men and women fall in love and peer bond so that they are in a position to have children and, and then the question is whether they will do it or not, but considering how women would like to.4. Uh, it, it’s, it seems that helping people pair up, that is where we initially should place our focus, in my opinion.
[34:17] Michelle: OK, that makes a lot of sense to me. Yes. OK, if that’s, that’s thanks for helping me understand that because I have been so curious about this. So it is, there is a value for children. There’s a desire for children. There’s, um, honor given to parenthood. The challenge is trying to find the pair bond to enable that, that value to play out. So it sounds to me, tell me if I’m correct, but I mean, from my perspective, we kind of broke monogamy like monogamy serves as well as um humans, I believe, you know, as we’re seeing and so we have descended and this is my perception of it and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but we’ve descended into a sort of dysfunctional version of polygyny. And um that is not serving us well as a species because all polygamous societies have similar problems where we have you know what we could term um in Mormon fundamentalism the lost boys all of the males without an opportunity for for mating, right? And then also um we we lose so many values like. Father, the paternal involvement in offspring and um you know we have we have a lot of problems that come from polygyny in the best of when it when it’s even officially recognized, you know, let alone sort of this accidental polygyny that we find ourselves in is that what you’re seeing you know that’s kind of what we’re seeing, right?
[35:40] Mads Larsen: Yeah, so, um, we need to go a little bit back in time. So for the past 4 million years. Polygyny has been generally widespread. But 2 million years ago, the norm had become monogamous for our species, but they were still polygynists. It’s just that when we were foragers. Uh, a man couldn’t provide for that many women, but with agriculture, when that was, when that was implemented, uh, powerful men for all the resources, including the women, and then you saw a strong uptick in polygyny and, and some men who had 10s, hundreds and some thousands of women. So, uh, polygyny has always been with us and it’s. It’s a good thing from the perspective that one of our strengths and species is a flexibility. So if you go to war and half the men get killed off, then you can practice polygyny with the men that are left. It’s, it’s a strength to have that. Uh, but exactly as you say, polygyny and in antiquity had a lot of adverse consequences. It commoditized women, it gave less attention to each child, sexual competition for powerful men was extended throughout their life as they were seeking new partners. As you mentioned, you have all these low value men who are left without mating prospects.
[37:02] Michelle: I want to jump into this conversation here and take a few minutes to highlight some of the information that Mats has written about, and that first made me want to interview him. We discussed these things somewhat, so you’ll hear a short repeat of some of this information. But I want to draw more specific attention to the areas of his research that are most applicable to the topic of polygamy, so that it doesn’t get lost in all of the other. Very important information he has to share. And so I can point out some of the connections I see to Mormon polygamy. As Mad stated here, and as he writes in his book, which is linked below, monogamy became the norm for our ancestors around 2 million years ago. I’ll add that that means, according to evolutionary science, our pre-human predecessors became mono. at the same time that they started using tools, claiming that polygamy is what is natural or best for our species is simply not true. According to the best evolutionary science, we were monogamous 1.7 to 1.8 million years before we were Homo sapiens, and about 1.9 million years before we developed the capacity for language. There weren’t necessarily societal or religious pressures to enforce monogamy. It was simply biologically advantageous. But with the development of agriculture and the inequality that ensued in the larger civilizations it enabled, patriarchal polygyny emerged in a big and rather horrifying way. I’ll let Mads explain this from his interview with Chris Williamson, which will also be linked below.
[38:32] Mads Larsen: What we see, what is quite interesting is that for those 2 million years, the norm was monogamous pair bonding with some polygyny, but um a really superior uh forager just couldn’t provide for that many, for that many females. But we see that with agriculture that took off and um resulted in in pretty extreme uh uh polygyny in, in the most um inequous environments. Around 7000 years ago, all the best agricultural land had been taken. So then if, if you wanted to grow, what you had to do was, um, was to take land from others and that created a 2000 year period from 7 to 5000 years ago that had a pretty bizarre mating regime.
[39:15] Michelle: So, for a 2000 year period between 7000 and 5000 years ago, polygyny became a far more common mating strate strategy for human societies. I’ll let Mad go on to describe what that looks like.
[39:31] Mads Larsen: And what probably happened was that for those 2000 years, all everyone did, uh, in order to be able to grow their tribes because the only way to grow was to take the fields of your neighbor. So then you had a universal system of intertribal rating where, when, when your kin group was strong enough, you would go to your neighbors, kill all the males, and take all the females and all the fields, and that was yours. And people kept doing this for 2000 years, uh, until 95% of the original male DNA was just wiped off the, off the genetic site. So it’s yeah, 2000 years of, of universal genocide and rape.
[40:12] Michelle: So I hope you noticed his description of what happened in polygamy when our ancestors returned to a polygamous mating strategy. Um, Mad’s research is based in the Nordic Nordic countries, not the Middle East, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of what appear to be similar patterns from the Old Testament. For one example, the destruction of the Midianites described in part in Numbers chapter 31, verses 17 to 18 say, Now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women Children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. Most of us find these parts of the Bible deeply, deeply troubling, as we should. So, as I’ve mentioned before, it is important to remember that Orson Pratt, the main theological, um, apologist for early Mormon polygamy, discussed this genocide in positive terms. This genocide and In positive terms as evidence of God’s support for polygamy and more recently, Ogden Crouch, the most prolific Mormon polygamy apologist in recent in recent memory, resurrected Pratt’s arguments. So let me show right here. This is Ogden Kraut’s book Polygamy and the Bible, and we’ll go ahead and start at Section 5, which is called Additional Wives as the Spoils of War. This is, um, he quotes those same verses from Numbers 31, and he says, with this law, the Lord made further provisions for polygamy among His people. This was a law allowing women who were taken as the spoils of war to be the wives to the Israelites. One instance of this was a war against the Midianites. Moses told the men that Of every tribe, 1000 of every tribe, 1000 throughout all the tribes of Israel, shall ye send to war. This meant that 12,000 able-bodied men went to war against the Midianites with instructions from the Lord that they would save only quote the women children that have not known a man by lying with him. After the destruction of this battle, there were 32,000 women taken as new wives. These Israelites took back home an average of nearly three wives each, noticed the exclamation point. This was the law of the Lord, and this was only one battle! exclamation point. It happened on many other occasions. There is little doubt that the Lord approved of polygamy when he gave this law to a people that already had a surplus of women. This was a law generally practiced by the Lord’s people, so they, they could increase their numbers and do dominions. This law was to be observed in their battles with all other nations, not just the M Midianites. For example, the Lord repeated it by saying, Whence thou comest comet nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And if it will make no peace with thee but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it. And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thy hands, thou shalt smite. Every male thereof with the edge of the sword, but the women and the little ones and the cattle and all that is in the city, even all the spoils of war, shalt thou take unto thyself. So interesting how we have the Old Testament in some sections, seemingly advocating the same morality that Mads is discussing in, um, in his work. I’m going to skip forward a little bit to continue. Um, um, Ogden Kraut goes on to discuss the principle that the Israelites were increasing their numbers upon the principle of plural marriages obtained through the ravages of war and obedience to the law as commanded by the Lord. Why did the Lord command soldiers to preserve the females and not the males? Because the Lord wanted his people to have a plurality of wives so they could raise up a numerous posterity quickly by men who would teach them the laws of God. These And brought into Israel and into the families of polygamists were subject to the rules of Israel. They soon learned that such a man was worthy of respect and honor. It did not take them very long to appreciate good men, even though they had brought into poly, they had been brought into polygamy by such catastrophic conditions. It is fascinating to me to see this polygamist apologist. basing his arguments on the exact same morality that Mads is describing and that we all are decrying in the work that he has done, isn’t this fascinating? Um, Kraut goes on to talk about how important it must be to Heavenly Father to send his children, some, no, I don’t. Like those terms that make God only male, but that to send his children, quote, to the homes of the of righteous men who would properly care for them and teach them good conduct and respect for God. He says God would, quote, rather trust a dozen children to a good man, meaning one of these men who succeeded in Genocide and rape. Um, where he would rather send a dozen children to a good man rather than give one child to a wicked man, meaning the men who were killed. This fits very well into the morality of what Mads describes as heroic love, that where, um, women just had to mate with the, um, the hero, meaning the one who succeeded, the man, the last man standing, right, as 19 out of 20 men. were killed during this culture. Kraut identified the men who committed the genocide and rape as the righteous men, the only men worthy of being fathers. And we’ll go ahead and read his last paragraph, how he sums this all up. Right here. He said, No wonder the Lord gave this law for taking women out of the camps of the wicked and giving them to the more honorable men. No wonder God provides. this regulation as a part of his law for plural marriage. I find this amazing. These comparisons are really important to recognize. For anybody inclined to believe that God ever commands polygamy, it is essential to see how unbelievably backward the morality of it is. These are the attitudes required to defend and advocate the idea that God commands polygamy, that God even sometimes commands polygamy. At least they are the arguments that have consistently been made by the main polygamist theologians, including the apostle Orson Pratt, who Brigham Young, um, charged with making the arguments to defend polygamy. This is why we must discuss and in My opinion, thoroughly reject these ideas. As Mads continues, you can see even more how similar the Mormon polygamist arguments and morality seem to be to this truly horrific time in human human civilization that Mads is describing.
[47:09] Mads Larsen: During this regime, a woman had to always be ready to submit to the greater warrior. You didn’t necessarily have a few rulers or other state structures that could protect people. People always up until this time lived in kin groups, and if other groups came and defeated you, then the men would be killed and enslaved, and the women would often be captured. So if women wanted a chance to survive and protect themselves and their children, they now had to submit to whomever had killed their father or their husband. So this was, uh, this was an extremely misogynistic rape culture, and this is what marked You could, up, up until, up until 1 1000 years ago, this, this was the original patriarchy where the male lineage is what matter and women are, they had different way of of conceptualizing this, but women were more like soil where the patriarchal seed were put. So this way, as long as you have these beliefs, you could just capture as many women as as you as you wanted or were able to and then keep growing your kin group.
[48:11] Michelle: So I need to acknowledge the early Mormon Utah was not always defined by rape. Um, that’s not, that’s not exactly how polygamy worked in early Mormon Utah. Although a woman or girl’s consent was not a priority, as many women and girls were assigned or given away in marriages to far older men that they likely would not have chosen, as was the case with my grand. Great grandmother, who was given away at 17 by Brigham Young in general conference to a man in his 40s. Um, and also, the misery of women in this society is well documented, including by Brigham Young himself. However, there is a very interesting twist between what Mads describes and what Brigham Young established. Instead of the most powerful warrior. wiping out men and stealing their wives. Brigham Young established a system where higher leaders in the church could marry the wives of lower status men in the church. I’ve before called it Brigham’s doctrine of marrying up, and this is what he taught in 1861, quote, If a woman can find a man holding the keys of the priesthood with a high with higher power and authority than her husband, And he is disposed to take her, he can do so. Otherwise she has got to remain where she is. There’s no need for a bill of divorcement. There are several different records of this talk that Brighamion gave describing this doctrine of marrying up, what right, where the higher status man could take the wife or the wives of the lower status men. It’s fascinating how this same pattern still shows up in Utah polygamy of higher status men taking the wives of lower status men even without violence. Although we can’t ignore the cases where it seems that there was violence, for example, Brigham Young’s support of Bishop. Bishop Warren Snow in Mantai, who in 1857 castrated Thomas Lewis. The castration is very well documented, although there is some uncertainty about the cause. It is possible that it was the result of some sexual indiscretion, but several sources claimed that the bishop, who was 39 at the time and all already married to 4 or 5 wives, depending on whether his fifth wife, a 14-year-old girl he married right about this time, Um, was the girl from the story, or it could possibly be the 17-year-old he married the same month. In any case, he wanted to marry a girl, possibly one of these wives, who was in love with Thomas Lewis, who was in his early to mid-20s, between 23 and 24. And when Lewis refused to give her up or to accept the mission call Bishop Snow issued to try to get him out of the way, um, the bishop took matters into his own hands and According to the sources we have, brutally castrated his competition, this younger man. One of the bishop’s counselors wrote a letter saying that the young man, quote, has now gone crazy after being castrated by the bishop. When Brigham Young heard what Bishop Snow had done, he responded, quote, I feel to sustain him. He wrote a letter to Bishop Snow advising him, quote, Just let the matter drop and say no more about it, and it will soon die away among the people. It is hard to escape the reality that polygamous societies, including early Utah, tend to revert to these forms of higher hierarchical power and at times violence. Another thing Mad discusses that is extremely applicable to Mormon polygamy is the commodification of women and the priority put on the lineage of men. I’ve often discussed section. What how 13 Section 132 fully commoditizes women, speaking repeatedly of them being taken from or given to men as punishments or rewards and destroyed if they will not comply. I can again share a few examples. 132 verse 39, David’s wives and concubines were given unto him of me, but because David has fallen, he shall not inherit them out of the world, for I Gave them unto another, sayeth the Lord in verse 44, God gives man, power by the power of my holy priesthood to take her and give her unto him that hath not committed adultery, but hath been faithful, for he shall be made ruler over many. Um, verse 48. Whatsoever you give on earth and to whomsoever you give anyone on earth, by my word and according to my law, it shall be visited with blessings and not cursings than some of these other threats of destruction. Now, recall this is addressing Joseph and Emma, although my argument that I think the history shows is that this was not actually Emma Joseph’s words. It was not actually referring to Emma Smith. It was compiled later by others, um, most likely in Utah. So verse 52. And let my handmade Emma. Smith, receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure before me, and those who are not pure and have said they were pure, pure shall be destroyed, sayeth the Lord God. And I give unto my servant that he shall be made ruler over many things. If any man of this is skipping out to verse 61, I’m just giving several examples to see how this continues to play out even in what is still our canonized scripture. If any man espouse a virgin virgin and decide to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espoused the second, and they are virgins and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified. He cannot commit adultery, for they are given unto him, for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth to him and to no one else. And if you have 10 virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong. To Him, and they are given unto him. Therefore, is he justified. But if one or either of the 10 virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery and shall be destroyed, for they are given unto him to multiply and replenish the earth according to my commandment. That’s what we claim to be the word of the Lord that I think we strongly need to question and re-evaluate, especially seeing the morality that it is based in. It is amazing to me. It really is that this section, which is stuck in this rape culture morality of 7000 to 5000 years ago, is canonized in our scriptures. So, Matt’s statement about the central importance of the lineage of men with women being viewed as merely the soil to carry the men’s. Noble seed is also extremely applicable to Mormon polygamy. Brigham Young actually said this, I would almost be ashamed of my body if it would beget a child that would not obey the law of God. I’ve I’ve talked about that before, comparing it to Adam from the Old Testament who begat got Cain. I won’t go into this topic of lineage here, but there is much to say on it. I will say, however, that I have been deeply troubled over the past few years, um, to see that one of the most rabid advocates, um, polygamy advocates, has taken to talking much about the critical importance of Lineage and sacred seed as her central way to explain and defend polygamy. Her arguments are quite incoherent, but are also extremely troubling. They make it abundantly clear that she still supports not only polygamy and the arguments that were used to defend it, but also the racial priesthood ban. Again, the morality that she adheres to in her pro-polygamy arguments fits much better in this awful polygamist culture of 7000 years ago than it does in the civilization that shaped the modern world. The pre-Civil War political leaders who coined the phrase the twin relics of barbarism to refer to polygamy and slavery have been proven correct. And so what a tragedy it is that people in our religion still hold to any of these elements of these atrocious practices. So I’ll go back to Mads where he is discussing yet another huge problem that always comes with polygamy, the Lost Boys.
[56:21] Mads Larsen: I’m sure it was an absolute nightmare for these people that had to go through this. And what drove much of this was, uh, that these kin groups generally practiced polygynous mating. So, uh, you’d had elite individuals who would hoard women as wives, concubines, and sex slaves. So for the, for the low value men, they didn’t have access to pair bonding or, or copulation. So then they were driven throughout antiquity to when they had a strong enough position. To go to whichever, uh, whomever their neighbors were, and then kill the men, take their stuff and take their women. So this, this polygynous mating that marked this period under heroic love, drove a lot of war, a lot of social instability. Um, it, it was quite an enormous change that happened when the church imposed lifelong monogamy, even on the most superior of males. That, that changed everything.
[57:14] Michelle: So this again, I just have to say of polygamy, by their fruits, you shall know them. The fruits of polygamy were always and are always inequality, instability, violence, and war in in every case that we have seen. And he’s, as he said, the church enforcing monogamy even on the most powerful males is what changed everything and finally brought civilization out of that awful time. I shouldn’t say it’s, it’s, um, I probably overstated that when I said it’s what always happens because I know that there are people who are trying to live ethical polygamy today. I just think that we need to be careful with the experiments that we are running because of what we can see throughout our human history. Um, defenders of polygamy had and have a very different perspective on the development of monogamy, the establishment of monogamy, than what maths is describing. In almost a perfect reversal of truth, many of them, including Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, Helen Whitney, and many, many, many others, claimed monogamy was a great evil, a hypocritical and tyrannical system that led to disease and death and would destroy civilization and the world. These are the arguments they needed. Make in order to defend and promote polygamy. Helen Mar Kimball wrote, It is a notorious fact where the system of monogamy prevails. The most common cause of murder is unhappy marriages. Husbands murder their wives, and wives murder their husbands or incite others to do it almost every week. Remember, the woman I spoke about who wrote that article uses Helen Mar Kimball as one of her main, um, examples of an advocate for polygamy, right, who she glorifies. On this topic, um, Brigham Young said in 1852, when polygamy was first acknowledged, the principle spoken upon by Brother Pratt, that means polygamy, we believe in, and I will tell you, for I know it, it will sail over and ride triumphantly above all the prejudice and priestcraft of the day. It will be fostered and believed in by the more intelligent portions of the world as one of the best doctrines ever ever proclaimed. claimed by any people. He went on to claim that others agreed with him that, quote, If the United States do not adopt that very method, let them continue as they now are, meaning in monogamy, pursue that precise course they that they are pursuing, and it will come to this, that their generations will not live until they are 30 years old. They are going to destruction. Disease is spreading so Fast among the inhabitants of the United States that they are born rotten with it, and within a few years they are gone. Apparently, according to Brigham Young, due to monogamy, it’s so fascinating to me every time I read this, how again inverted it is with what actually happened. It was the church that went to destruction as long as it pursued monogamy, just as the Book of Mormon warned, and always warns will happen. And so this was the same 1852 conference where Orson Pratt claimed that quote, giving his faithful servants a plurality of wives was the Lord’s way to prevent hunts of prostitution, degradation, and misery. He explained that this was necessary, quote, for we have got a fallen nature to grapple with. That’s what Orson Pratt said. I always, I always have to read it, and 17 years later, He was still talking about the evils of monogamy that was developed by old pagan Rome and its Greek worshippers of idols. Um, this is quoting him, old pagan Rome and Greece, worshipers, worshipers of idols, passed a law confining man to one wife. You may think that this is a strange statement, but it is a but it is a fact that those nations were the founders of What is termed monogamy. All other nations with few exceptions had followed the scriptural plan of more wives than one. So, again, the scriptures promote more wives than one. apparently he hadn’t read the Book of Mormon very much. The because it always promotes one wife and only one wife and decries forbids, and, um, um, um, what’s the word I’m looking for, condemns any other system. Um, I’ll go on quoting Pratt. The one wife system has been established by law among the nations descended from the great Roman Empire, namely the nations of modern Europe and and the American states. So, you know, the nations that gave us human rights, self-government, the preservation of the Bible, the printing press, literacy, infrastructure, science, and so much more. The foundation of weird nations, which means Western educated in. Industrialized, rich and democratic, the nations we are very thankful to live in emerged through and because of monogamy. But that is not Pratt’s view. He goes on. This law of monogamy or the monogamic system laid the foundation for prostitution and the evils and disease of the most revolting nature and character under which modern Christendom groans. For as God has implanted, I always, again, have to, when they blame. Um, monogamy for prostitution. It’s so interesting to go to the Old Testament story of the patriarch that went to the prostitute that turned out to be his daughter-in-law, Tamar, right? That was not in the monogamic system. To claim that prostitution emerged as a result of monogamy is, again, extreme historical and scriptural illiteracy. And so he, um, continues, God has implanted for a wise purpose. certain feelings in the breasts of females as well as males, the gratification of which is necessary to help and happiness, and which can only be accomplished legitimately in the married state. Myriads of those who have been deprived of the privilege of entering that state, rather than be deprived of the gratification of those feelings altogether, have in despair given way to the wickedness and licentiousness. Hence the whoredoms and prostitution. Among the nations of the earth, where the mother of harlots has her seat. That’s what he has to say about monogamy. So according to the polygamist Pratt, monogamy is the cause of every societal ill, while polygamy would lead to utopia. Um, Mad’s work truly does reveal that the very opposite is true, and the studies that he cites in his work. So I’m going to play this one last clip of MADs, and then we’ll get back to the conversation.
[1:03:30] Mads Larsen: So this is when they uh dissolved Europe’s tribes to prohibiting cousin marriage, changing rules uh for inheritance and ownership, and then imposing lifelong monogamy, which was a very unusual, unique, rather extreme way of thinking of mating. But when you do this, this, if you want to understand the origins of the modern world, this was it. Because this, then you create the sexual egalitarianism, this is how you make parents invest in children. This is You prepare for growth and where you start creating a different, more individualistic psychology, different way of thinking, your lower men’s testosterone. So instead of, uh, superior men competing all their life to acquire more women, you get to compete until you get one. And then you have to, uh, put your efforts in more, in a more productive direction.
[1:04:17] Michelle: It is hard to overstate how important this change was and how much it affected society for the better. Um, the, the lowering of men’s testosterone and focusing men’s efforts and energies and brain chemistry in more productive direction. is incredibly important. I covered this topic in depth, um clear back in episode 26, which is called Polygamy and the Male Brain. I, I will also link it below. It is a fascinating and extremely important topic to understand. And so now with this deeper understanding of the real impacts and outcomes of polygamy um and how it relates to our history of Mormon polygamy and the arguments that are still sometimes being made, and again, you’ll hear a little bit of this um repeated going forward with this understanding, we can now go back to the conversation where Mads shares a breathtaking insight that completely blew me away.
[1:05:16] Mads Larsen: Uh, but exactly as you say, polygyny and in antiquity had a lot of adverse consequences. It commoditized women, it gave less attention to each child, sexual competition for powerful men was extended throughout their life as they were seeking new partners. As you mentioned, you have all these low value men who are left without mating prospects. But probably the main driver of the Viking age was that there was such a high rate of polygyny and late lineage. Iron Age Scandinavia that regular men were simply didn’t have any mating opportunities. So when technology and, and the political context facil made possible rating, they went out into Europe to get women and to get richest to qualify for the domestic mating market. So it, it, it’s all it’s, it’s driven so much war. It’s driven so much internal stability throughout history. We have this problem with roaming bands of unmarried men causing all kinds of havoc. So polygamy has been very destabilizing and, and. For whatever reason, the church decided to get so serious on lifelong monogamy at the West for sexual revolution around 1200, that created the foundation for modernity. Without it, as I said earlier, this would not have happened, at least not as it did because it created a new psychology, a sexual egalitarianism, where most men were married. And I mean it for our species, probably of those who reached adulthood, 80% of women reproduce but only 40% of men. So the church imposed from the first to the 3rd section revolution and uniquely egalitarian mating regime in the West. Uh, and this peaked in the 1950s in the West with near universal marriage. Almost everyone married and they did so late, they started having children early. Uh, this is what we moved away from. We now have the first societies in the world with free women, where women can make strong partner choices. And we now have a similar stratification as we had in antiquity like before the first sexual revolution. Um, but then, in the ancient world, uh, women were distributed based on how men did in, in patriarchal status games, power games. So if you could accumulate a lot of resources, you could then have the women you could afford and desired. Uh, and then we have this uniquely egalitarian mating regime which created modernity, which was the foundation for that. And now we have a similar stratification of men, what researchers call a de facto polygamist regime. Uh, but this time it’s not based on the patriarchal status games of men, it’s based on female mate preferences. And we can get into if you want to, the, the difference between women’s promiscuous attraction system and the pair bonding attraction system. And that explains a lot of why you have during this mating regime since the 1960s, seen as stronger and stronger stratification among men, where a small proportion of the most attractive men uh get an increasing number of sex partners and mating opportunities in pair bonds, while a growing proportion of the men at the bottom are shut out of this, this part of the world. They’re just discriminated against and and excluded. And the thing is that that has been the reality for men throughout our history most of the time that men cannot rely on being able to enter into a fatherhood phase. Uh, like I said, fewer than half of men who live got to reproduce. Uh, but now the power is with the women. So if we’re going to do before, the power was with the patriarchy, men ruled the world. Now women rule this part of the world, the mating regime. It’s, it’s they have the power of the shortened mating market, which is the entry point to the long term mating market. So if we’re going to solve this, women have to take the lead. They have the power. This is the regime we have now based on their preferences, and if they want, if they, if women want there to be free women also in the future, we have to find a way to reconcile today’s regime with reproduction. Otherwise, As I’ve said, we will disappear.
[1:09:14] Michelle: OK, OK, there was so much there. So a couple of things I want to talk about. First of all, you blew my mind with I hadn’t even considered that, you know, we’ve always heard about the Vikings attacking the European, you know, that like, like what I just heard you say is that kind of grew out of polygyny. Polygamy is what caused the Viking raids or is a part of what led to them. These were the disenfranchised unpaired men who were attacking. Is that part of what what you’re saying with that?
[1:09:43] Mads Larsen: Yeah, that was, that was the main driver in the sense that this is what drove people to do this. They couldn’t get access to women. And also on the top, this was an alliance between high and low status men. The high status men wanted to ready to get more women, uh, and then the low status men wanted to get to him. So this is throughout, especially through antiquity, so many wars were driven by the community becoming strong enough to be able to attack a neighbor and take their women. Uh, the grossest, bizarres expression of this, I mean, that shows you how deep this is in our nature, was what happened from 7 to 5000 years ago. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. Um. 95% of, yeah, yeah, so this was, this was a big puzzle that was discovered. Nobody expected this was discovered in 2015 through the study of ancient DNA. We saw that from 7 to 5 1000 years ago, uh, Y chromosome diversity declined by 95%, while female DNA diversity increased the population growth, 19 out of 20 men disappeared. So first they thought that was due to rampant polygyny, but that, that was a terrible hypothesis. That’s just, it’s, it’s not in line with human nature for a variety of reasons. You couldn’t have that strict of regime everywhere and have it be stable. What probably happened was that when all the good agricultural land was taken 7000 years ago, universally across the old world, meaning not America, which was where this study was taken, uh, kin groups when they When they outgrew their territory, their only means for continued growth was to raid their neighbors, kill all the men, and take their women in fields. And we did this for 2000 years until only 5% of the original. It’s it’s a bit hard to, but of 5% of the so you could say very simplistically that 5% of the population had killed 95% of the population or replaced them, as we say, um, so this is, this, this type of Women are the most important resources for which men compete. Everything else is on top of that, money, status, power games. It’s for all organisms that the reproduction is the most fundamental task. It’s just that humans have built so much more on top of that than the other species. But if we lose sight of the importance and centrality of reproduction and of having mating that functions and let reproduce our populations, we’re doing ourselves great disservice. And when we look back in the, in the past and see how many different regimes we’ve had and, and how human mating nature and male and female preferences play out in different environments, you see that things change quite a bit, but there’s these, there are these underlying motivations that we have to be aware of now that we again have to create a new mating regime. So we don’t go in those directions that, that have played, particularly the American left, uh, let’s say since the introduction of this regime where there’s been this push toward, well, let’s just create non-biologically related families, let’s just come together and live in communes and have free love and take care of each other’s children, um. I love that thought. That’s the, that’s the culture I grew up with, but we do have to consider the, the, the empirical findings too. Uh, those, those experiments didn’t play out that well, and they continue not to play out that well. That is probably not where we’re going to find a solution to the challenges that we face today.
[1:13:17] Michelle: OK, so a lot of things I wanna respond to again. So that idea of sort of communal parenting, one of the things that fails to take into consideration, which makes it unlikely to succeed, is the, like, human nature of love, love for our offspring, right? The parental bonding, the oxytocin that’s released. And it’s like, like, I believe some of the highest, um, percentages of child abuse comes from a non-parent, like a Step parent or a caregiver, they tend to be abusive to children more than parents do and I and I’ve assumed that’s partly because there’s just this important biological care for our offspring that it’s hard to replace just through an ideology is would you agree with that? Is that part of.
[1:13:57] Mads Larsen: Yeah, those numbers are, are bizarre in terms of, of your, your danger for severe abuse or murder. And that is multiplied by between 40 and 100 times. So, uh, having a non-biological parent, it increases the risk enormously, but still, they are relatively small numbers, so we shouldn’t exaggerate that. But yeah, in terms of what you said earlier, in terms of being raised communally. Uh, not necessarily, I mean. What we vo for us. Being raised communal in a sense, uh. The forage your mating cycle was 3 to 4 years. A strong love tends to last 12 to 18 months. So it seems that when we are around 4 million years ago, transitioned from a promiscuous mating regime to pair bonding. Uh, our feelings of love only evolved to help us through the offspring’s most vulnerable face. So a man and a woman would meet, and they would feel sexual attraction, romantic attraction, they would think. It was a great idea to pair up, to have a child would be wonderful, and then to work together to, to protect the child, provide calories and, and, and raise it when it’s very young. But then it would, once it was old enough to kind of walk around, it could progress to communal rearing, uh, within, within your, uh, within your herd. Uh, within your forger band, that’s the, that’s the word I was looking for, yeah, so within the band, um, and I think that is one of the troubles we have today in terms of, of reproduction. We don’t have support. Those of us who live in, in cities and have moved away from our family and kin networks to be here. We are very alone in the city. We don’t, we don’t have that now, we have daycares as a substitute for some hours, but not having, uh, an extended family to rely on or a group that can, that can pitch in and help us, it leaves parents and especially single moms very isolated, and, and that imposes one of the many costs on reproduction that we didn’t have in our, our ancestral environment. Back then, Experts think that it was probably adaptive to break up after 3 to 4 years. It, it was better to have children with different fathers because uh you would get genetic variety, you will get a, a larger and stronger net of alliances. So that was, that was how we made it during those 2 million years as, as, as Guinea Omo. Uh, and then with agriculture that tied us to the field and you can’t in case of divorce, you can’t just break up the fields in two and carry away your half. So that’s when we, uh, developed the ideal of lifelong love. That was an A necessity of the agricultural environment. And now that we’ve gotten out of this with urbanization and then with this new mating regime from the 1960s, we have reverted to our original pair bonding for which we’ve all, which is serial pair bonding, interspersed with opportunistic short-term relationships. But we also have contraceptives, so we can choose not to get pregnant, uh, through promiscuous sex. And um We’re still, we don’t have that, that for the band to support us. Children have become very expensive. They stay with us for a long time. So there’s so many benefits in today’s environment to have a lifelong pair bond, to find someone and have several children with them and and spend your entire life with them. If you Pull that off. There are so many social and economic benefits that it’s a really good idea, but it’s hard because your nature doesn’t facilitate it. Your nature, your emotions help you get past 34234 years, and then if you want it to last longer than that, there’s some more work to be done.
[1:17:55] Michelle: Mhm. And so that’s why, OK, so maybe that’s part of why the value, um, like the externalized value from the church or from other, um, institutions sort of a societal um expectation of lifelong pair bond was necessary to undergird the challenges of marriage to to keep marriages together or or families together because I guess it’s not the marriages that is that is.
[1:18:22] Mads Larsen: The way I see it, the main function of culture is to coerce individuals into act in a way that their emotions try to make them not act. But to do this for the case of the community. So whatever the functionality of a community requires in a certain environment, that’s what culture needs to program into you. So yes, and, and the Mormon Church has knock that out of the park, in terms of, in terms of lifelong pair bonds and uh and reproduction. That’s a very effective culture for facilitating that. The Norwegian culture of today. is not particularly effective at facilitating that. And we’re very happy with that because we love our freedoms and we generally think Mormons are strange for being so happy and successful, but in the long run, those who reproduce survive and those who don’t disappear.
[1:19:16] Michelle: Right, OK, and I wanna, I wanna, I find myself wanting to push back on your language sometimes when you say words like coerce, because, um, because it does sound to me like it, it misses something that I think it, it, the way it frames it makes it appear negative, right? Like, um, like we have to coerce people to do things because I think it’s um. Like I have to coerce my children, if you want to say that to, um, do things that, that lead to their long term well-being and their long term happiness, right? My children might like to just lay in bed and eat candy and I have to coerce them to not do that. But I, I prefer the language of like, I have to teach them or encourage behaviors and understand. Standing that will lead to uh a longer term wellbeing because and and longer term I think longer term both in the life of the human because I don’t I don’t tend to think that um um serial pair bonding or promiscuous mating tends to lead to the most happiness for the greatest number of people I think that it tends to. Not to do that, but then also the well-being of the community, as you said, you know, so I, so I’m curious about how um like, like it doesn’t feel like coercion as much as understanding that you know, you know, to use a religious term by their fruit you shall know them and in some ways this little magical period we had of. Um, what, you know, I know people have gotten in trouble for using the term enforced monogamy, but it just means societal, the societal expectation of monogamy leads to incredible like you said, we have the ability to sit and talk to each other. We have this amazing culture and these um that that we have because of enforced monogamy because of this societal expectation of long term pair bonding and in and and co-parental co-parental investment in children. That leads to a lot of satisfaction for many people and of course there are, you know, you know I, I, I do think that it’s important to allow for divorce, you know, but, but I think that prioritizing the understanding that you know what you have hurdles there are hard times in your marriage but boy when you get past those there’s so much so much deeper satis. Faction and bonding and unity than you would have in a shorter term relationship that it’s worth worth really trying for that. That’s something I’m glad that has been part of my society to help me understand that because it has, you know, marriage is is hard. I absolutely will acknowledge that and parenting can be hard, but the satisfaction and joy that comes from real recognizing that it’s worth the investment is is really um something sad you know it’s sad to me that people seem to not be aware of that.
[1:21:54] Mads Larsen: Yeah, no, we, one of the main issues here is that we become blind to our own culture. We kind of see it as air, we just take it for granted. So one of the arguments in this locality debate is that it’s, and this is quite common across the West also, also in Norway, uh, that it’s highly inappropriate to try to influence individuals’ choices. So I bring the attention to how modern dating markets make it hard for women to find someone with whom they compare bond. Then people think, well, but we have to have a regime where women take their own choices individually because we’re the most hyper individualistic culture that ever existed, the modern West. Um. We don’t understand that the environment we have created. Comes with impulses that interact and influence our mating preferences and mating nature in a way that makes us take certain choices. Whereas if we were in a different environment, we would act differently. So there’s no neutral environment where you have autonomous individuals making rational choices. So the question we have to ask then is, What society do we want? Do we want reproduction and pair bonding? Do we want monogamy? Do we want promiscuity polygamy? What do we want? And then we have to create, and, and this is what we’ve always done. You have very often artists and writer, they, they dream up how they want, and this is what I in stories of love from like Tinder I analyze works of literature through this period. To see how uh they deal with these new ideologies, the transitions between them, and how they think new. And then you see the societies over the next decade working toward this vision like we did with confluent love, we work toward that form. I could say, yeah, over two centuries, we worked to create this regime, this environment where men and women were free to choose their own partners. That, that took a lot. I would say it was one of the, I would say, I would claim that it is perhaps one of the main motivations for modernity was in the, the ability to, to get individual partner choice. That’s been a strong drive in the West, uh, for the past uh millennium. Uh, so. Being afraid. Of cultural changes or policies that create new impulses. That’s not indoctrinating people necessarily or taking away their freedoms or depriving women of choice. It’s just that in the environment we have now. Women have all the power on the short-term market, and many use it to give an extraordinary amount of attention to the most attractive males that results in a lot of dating and sex with higher value males. But because those males aren’t willing to pair bond with the women with lower mate value, an increasing number of women end up single without family, without children, and they’re unhappy with that. And then we have to ask, and then the question isn’t, are we going to like an incel forums, some men argue that there should be government-mandated policies, women are allowed to sleep with men who are more attractive than them. Of course, I don’t believe in that at all. We shouldn’t, we shouldn’t start prohibiting or forcing women from doing anything. But if we can create dating arenas where women get a chance. To spend more time with men with similar uh mate value over a longer period of time and they need enough of those men that will drastically increase their chances for forming a pair bond and thus being in a position to have children if they choose to do so. So it’s not about forcing people culturally, culturally indoctrinating them. It’s, it’s about deciding what kind of society we want, and then reverse engineering to try to think what kind of environment do we have to build to have that society to get the outcomes we want. And then build those impulses into the system.
[1:25:51] Michelle: OK, and then also see, and, and I, I like the thinking about sort of the structural changes that can be sort of imposed by government, but what I’m hearing also is it sounds to me like there’s a huge need for, I don’t mean to use a condescending. Work by education because I think many of these women are not many many women maybe just don’t understand the things that were part of my culture to understand right? like when um when women are. In the dating market and not maybe fully aware of the short term, um, the short term nature of their high status, right? And it’s not even a really high status, it’s just the, the difference between men and women that like and and I don’t wanna, um, impose my perspective on other women, but my, my general understanding and my belief is that women generally do. You want to pair bond. And that usually when they’re sleeping around, they’re thinking, this is my way to pair bonding, without being aware that actually, no, you are like the men, the high-value men, the high status men who are sleeping with the 80% of women, you know, they have very different ideas of where this will go, of what the long term, you know, outcomes will be. And so women, it feels to me, spend all of these years sleeping around looking for that guy only to realize, oh, now I don’t have the same market value, but these are horrible terms to use, but I don’t have the same value in the dating market, right? And so I have even less opportunity for sleeping around, less opportunity for pair bonding, and zero opportunity for motherhood. And that seems like a tragedy that has been, that has been sort of imposed on women through this these modern values that do not serve women well that women don’t understand in time
[1:27:40] Mads Larsen: often. Yeah, because it’s, it’s, we’ve only had this regime for 50 years and it’s the first time in human history we have it. We haven’t developed cultural scripts. Uh, that we should instill into our children so that they can understand this market. So it’s, it’s very confusing, uh, and people don’t like to talk about it. It’s kind of an uncomfortable topic. So we haven’t been able to spread this. So yeah, there’s a lot of confused women there. I, I, I wrote an article, I published an article earlier this year where I, where I, where I coined the term instincts, the female counterpart to insults, involuntary single women. And, and show there and, and it’s important to stress that what you said earlier, I mean, that’s not universal. Many women on occasion or, or for longer periods of time, do pursue promiscuous mating and find that highly rewarding. Uh, they might come out of a long-term relationship and want to sleep around a bit and they enjoy that, but many women are becoming traumatized by now. Is that When they pursue that strategy. They are at the same time also looking for boyfriends. You could say, yeah, sometimes women just want promiscuous sex, but it is very common that their involvement on the short term market is a long-term strategy. Um, but then with the technologies we have now, we’ve opened up this market in a way that if you enter it without understanding how it works and how mate bodies work and what the difference is on the power differential between short and long term mating. It’s easy for women to get traumatized because they spend year after year after year, uh, dating and having sex with these attractive men who are never willing to commit. And, and I’ve I’ve cited many Norwegian women who’ve written in the media of the past year how men are immature. They want to commit. They don’t want something challenging, they just want to sleep around. Uh, and that’s not true. It’s, it’s just a very small proportion of men who get to sleep around who women consider to be good enough for the short term mating market. And those men have many options. And if, if you as a man have 1520, 30, 40 new sex partners a year, of course, you’re not going to be the boyfriend of every single one of them. So I, I, in there I use as an illustration in that article, a Swedish novel written by Amandaru. When she turned 30, she decided to get a partner, a life partner. So she thought she’d have to go on, you know, meet 56 men and, and then she would find someone to spend a significant amount of her life with. And after 2 years, she had sex with 50 men. And not a single one of them invited her for a second date. And that I argue is a consequence of the power that women have on apps like Tinder and in real life. So the numbers for Tinder, some studies suggest that what happens. Is that when the average woman goes on Tinder, the first thing she does is to delete 95% of men. They do not get to exist termating as potential mates. So 95% of the profiles are just gone. The 5% that she finds most attractive are the ones that she’s willing to communicate with on Tinder. And then in the next filtration before she meets them in real life, out of those 5% that remain, 98% is filtered out. And then when she meets them in real life, out of those 80% are filtered up before she has sex with a man. And this isn’t the most attractive women, this is the average woman who impose on the male dating pool of filtration. Well, first there’s always as filtration where if you’re not attractive enough as a man on Tinder, you’re probably not going to be there too long because you’re not gonna achieve anything. There’s probably an overrepresentation of attractive men on Tinder to begin with, which is another filtration. But then the filtration is 95%, 98%, and 80%. And then you have to ask yourself, as the average woman who does this, what are the chances that if The man that you’re sitting across from have the same power as you have. Would you get through that filtration? It’s a pretty strong filtration. Um, and, and somehow thinking that those men are representative of men in general or that those men would be willing to pair bond, uh, with a random woman who, who, who just selected him for sex. It’s just unlikely. uh. Women have to date and meet men of similar values themselves, and they have to give themselves time. It’s if, if the promiscuous attraction system is very quick, you see some, you can see someone in their. Hot and you go, I want to have sex with him. I want to have sex with that guy because he’s so hot. It’s very quick to find out then you have to talk to him a little bit to see if he’s, he’s off or, or if you’re compatible and it’s a pretty quick system. Often when you fall in love, you have to, a woman has to meet a man several times, uh. To discover that there’s to get to know them better, to see that there’s something there that you connect to in a romantic way. And modern dating and modern technologies don’t facilitate that. If you’re a low value man and you and you and you put your photos and, and your text on Tinder, it’s very hard for a woman to fall in love with an average man through a cell phone. It’s, it’s the technology just doesn’t facilitate it. So we’ve created this, this system where women like Amandaruan, I’ve known many women like this. They go through years and years of dating and just End up thinking that men are just not serious. They don’t understand why these men only want sex and, and, and these situationships instead of parenting. And if, if we can increase, increase the awareness of how women have this amazing power on the short-term market, all women have basically unlimited access to sex with as many men as they want, and, and often men that are a lot more attractive than them, while most men do not have access to the short-term market. And if they understood that, then yes, they can if they want to pursue. Uh, promiscuous sex for a period of their life, that’s a wonderful privilege to have, but it’s not a good strategy if your ultimate goal is to pair bond, which it is for most men and women.
[1:33:36] Michelle: OK, OK. So, OK, there’s so much to to everything you say, it makes my mind go a million directions. But it’s, um, a, a couple of things. It seems to me that, um, I, I’m, I’m, what I’m, what I’m wondering about is this idea of, um, sort of enforced monogamy. That’s, I wish, I wish we had better terms for many of these things, but the societal standard of pair bonding and monogamy. And, um, and then, um, it seems to me not to be coincidental possibly that sex you um being bound within marriage was part of the magic that made that work, right? When we did have this societal expectation for monogamy, it didn’t couple well with what we could term promiscuity, which is like sleeping around before getting married is and that’s kind of. I think I think we’re in this time where there’s this hybrid expectation where it’s like we want marriage but we wanna sleep around first or we think sleeping around is a way to attain marriage and what we’re finding is that maybe or or what I’m what my mind is thinking about is that maybe this idea of marriage is sort of a relic of the past model we had where there was an expectation of. You know, chastity before marriage and fidelity within marriage. So you really, the expectation was not only that you would be married to one partner for your whole life, but you would only have sex with one partner for at least the majority of your life. And so, so we still have that expectation, but thought, oh, but we can sleep around first, but really those are different systems, different games that maybe don’t blend well together. Do you understand what I’m saying? Yeah, well,
[1:35:10] Mads Larsen: the challenge there is the difference between men and women’s promiscuous attraction. For men, as, as they evolved, it was beneficial for their genetic legacy to slip around a lot. If men were able to have promiscuous sex, they had a chance to make women pregnant, and even though they didn’t make a paternal investment, a certain percentage of those. Children would grow up and have children on their own. It would promote the legacy. But for women, that was not the case. They can only have one child per year or say. And so for them, the most important thing was to ensure a genetic quality if if the man wasn’t going. So either find a man with whom they can compare bond who will uh protectture and provide calories and and. And, and invest in the child. But if she’s not going to get that, the best strategy is just to go for the best genes. So men’s promiscuous attraction system is very generous and inclusive. Most men perhaps want to sleep with most women because that was, was beneficial in a revolutionary past. Now it’s been reconnected from reproduction, but that hasn’t changed our emotions to that great an extent. Um, while women, when it comes to, only want to have sex with a very small proportion of men, women are. Sexually attracted to men. Uh, if anything, women more generally feel repulsion at the thought of sex with a random man, uh, while a man would be excited by the thought of sex with a random woman. So if you have a promiscuous system like we have there, to a great extent, most mating opportunities will be channeled to the very most attractive men, uh, because those are the men who are able to arouse that sexual lust in women due to an attraction system that is millions and millions of years old. Um, so, uh, I mean, the utopia of confluent love, the regime we live in now is that if we only free us from all oppressive culture. Often understood as the church, uh. Then men and women will be free to live out their erotic and romantic desires. We just needed to get rid of the oppression. So now we’ve done that and the result, it’s, it’s quite the opposite. Most men have no, no minimal access to the shorter mating market. They do not get to live out their erotic desires and And men have a much higher desire for that than women. So in no, according to one study, women want to have 5 sex partners in a lifetime, while men want 25. It’s just their promiscuous attraction system is uh stronger, more generous, well, not necessarily stronger, that’s the wrong one. women and we study show that. When women meet a man that is exceptionally attractive, she is as aroused as men are when they meet women that are exceptionally attractive. While when women meet average men, they’re much less interested than if a man meets an average woman. And in Norway, which is a very feminist country, women also in those situations, pursue the man more strongly than a man would if he met an attracted an attractive woman. Uh. So In this system that we thought, well, at least a utopia of rate, everybody would live in this erotic romantic paradise. Instead, we see that women get to sleep around as much as they like, but they don’t value it as much as men would if they had the chance. And over time, if that is all they get, that tends to many women to become quite traumatic because they get rejected after having sex and feel that they’re not good enough to be anybody’s girlfriend or there’s something wrong with men. And then, This makes more difficult the process of pair bonding so that both men and women have increasing single rates. It’s, I mean, it’s so sky high compared to previous times. Um, In most senses, um. So nobody’s winning, you could say perhaps the high value men at the top win by getting a chance to have sex with more than 100 women in their lifetime. Uh, and we don’t need to go too much into what the what what could be, um. Adverse about that because it’s kind of a complex topic, but it’s, it’s not given that this is a great victory for those men either. And what we see as a result now an an alarming number of young people are, are pulling out of mating altogether out of, out of young single Americans, more than half say that they either want sex or a relationship. Dating has just become so dysfunctional and unpleasant for both men and women. Uh, that they’re, that, that they’re just withdrawing. They don’t want to deal with it anymore, and that affects pair bonding, which again affects, uh, family farming and fertility. So we, we have a, uh, we have a mating market now that is highly dysfunctional for a large part of the population.
[1:39:39] Michelle: Yes, absolutely. And that is such a tragedy because really, um, human flourishing kind of also comes from human striving, right? And, and one of the reasons that we are a goal, we are accomplishment oriented people is because of pair bonding. It’s, right? Like, like for For men often achieving like, like, um, a driving motivation for men to become their best selves to accomplish as much as they can is to attract a mate, it seems to me, right?
[1:40:12] Mads Larsen: And, and so it’s, it’s the primary motivation. It’s the deepest motivation.
[1:40:16] Michelle: Yes, and so if we remove that, what we have created is hopelessness rather than striving, and that is not bode well for society. Like this seems to me to be destructive on every single level for individuals as well as for our our. Communities and society because at some point the men that have um sort of just settled in the hopelessness, right? How long does it take till they form whatever it was you talked about the roaming bands of single men who can attack and do you know do you know what I mean like we we’re being held. Together by this thin veneer of social, uh, you know, um, mores of what still is seen as acceptable it’s not acceptable to go attack the neighboring community and take the women, right? But, but we have broken down so many of our social mores and what is seen as acceptable that we are kind of. Hanging on the like it’s kind of like we are, you know, we have the corpse of our old values that we’re still um existing off of but we have to we have to either come up with something better or I mean we’re we’re in a really precarious situation it seems to me, not only for our demography for our reproduction rates, but, but in, in many different ways. Because of what we have done to, to, you know, pair bonding, as, as I see it. I think that what you’re talking about with this, um, with Tinder, it is really interesting because when I think about being in college, you know, which was the old way to date when, um, when I was in college, and, um, sure, you would see that really cute guy, but if he didn’t ask you out. You weren’t gonna go out with him, right? Like you you did just kind of settle into, you’d get asked out by a lot of guys you might not be that interested in. You’d go out with them, but there’d be then that magic moment where someone you’re interested in asks you out and you, right? And you kind of settle in where you, um, where you align. And, and so it, it did work when we were actually, um, it wasn’t enforced. First, it was just you were more aware of what kind of guys were attracted to you, what kind of guys, what, you know, and, and the guys got a sense of what women should I ask out because, you know, like, like, it, it just had to work out that way. And you, and you kind of naturally settled into where you could find a pair bond, where on Tinder, like you’re talking about, women aren’t having that, like, like everybody’s an option. On on Tinder, so women can only choose that one most attractive guy, and we’ve broken something really important and I don’t, yeah, anyway, so I guess I’m just, um, I don’t know if you have anything to respond to from what I’ve just been talking about. Yeah.
[1:42:49] Mads Larsen: So that was uh 3 aspects of we’ll take it in uh in the opposite chronological direction. So, uh, it, it absolutely is enforced. It’s social enforcement. So if, if when you’re in social circles, uh, women’s choices were restricted, uh. In different ways. One was uh through slut shaming. So if you’re a college and you sleep with, with 50 men and everybody knows about it, uh, your chances of finding a high value husband will diminish because uh you will get a bad reputation. So there’s reputational damage. Uh, dating today, there’s a tendency for it to go underground. Uh, a Swedish sociologist about this, and women who, who, when they go date and, and sleep around and, and often then get rejected post cordially by these men. Uh, they don’t want any of their friends to know about their dates. They don’t get to see them. It’s dating has become private. It used to be a social act in social arenas. Now it’s removed out of people’s social circles, um, so they can’t afflict social pressure on them. And before also, uh, uh, uh, uh, the hottest guy at college, if he’s at a party, he can mostly only flirt and invest in one woman, and, and maybe he can bring her home that night if he’s successful. Um. And if, if you’re an average woman in a, in a, in a party setting, if it’s a highly attractive man goes for you, then that can harm his, his, his partner value and so about what people seeing that he, he goes for women of lesser value. Uh, that’s not an issue today. Uh, you can, as a woman go on Tinder and select the very most attractive men, and they will compete very hard for an opportunity to have sex with you. Uh, and those men can also keep, and so even though that it doesn’t have the same, uh, potential for reputational damage for a man’s partner value as it has for a woman in this act, it’s just that he now instead of having to pick one woman in a social setting. He can groom a large amount of women, women, and then meet them sequentially. So it’s just things have become much more easier and underground with technology. And now let’s jump one back to these roving bands of men. Uh, David Buss and William Costello, to a psychologists, launched a very interesting hypothesis recently called the male sedation hypothesis. So they believe that the reason we don’t have roaming bands of unmarried men is, it’s porn, internet porn and gaming. Where these men can find a substitute satisfaction sexually and status wise, uh, online. So, uh, that could be quite beneficial for our societies, although it’s perhaps quite dystopic for individuals. And then to jump and one more step back. What does this sexual stratification, uh, do to men? I’ve tried, in Norway, we’re very concerned with this. So we’ve had in this century 3 government missions to try to find out why more and more men are becoming losers while they’re becoming marginalized, while they’re falling behind women and so many aspects of society, most prominent, of course, being education, where there’s so many more women taking higher education than men. And, and it’s just, you have all these um areas in life you say well men just fall further and further behind and we’re trying to figure this out. We had 3 commissions. And I’ve tried to influence them. I try to speak out and, uh, not a single one of them allowed the commission were willing to study dating and mating and sexual stratification. And all three of them came up with, no, it’s a complete puzzle. So the, the first one said that, well, men aren’t marginalized and to the extent they’re marginalized, it’s because they’re not feminist enough. Then the second one said that, yeah, men are marginalized. We have no idea why. And then the third one I thought would at least come with some suggestions, and they just said, no, they’re not feminist enough. So yeah, it’s, it’s really difficult in a feminist society as ours, and I applaud it. Feminism has done great things for Norway, but um, it does come with a lot of blind spots. You need other theoretical frameworks if you want to understand male marginalization, and I mean, Men and women exist separately for sexual reproduction. And for most species, including humans. Women perform the sexual selection, so nothing is more important for a male organism than the ability to pass the test of sexual selection and have an opportunity to have sex, to become a boyfriend, to become a father, to be part of a family. That is the deepest foundation of our organism. And now that more and more men are excluded from sex, from dating, from relationships, from fatherhood and families, we would absolutely, from an evolutionary perspective, expect these men to become demotivated to start pulling out to not trying their hardest. Men try hard to increase their status to accumulate resources precisely to achieve that aspect of life. And if that becomes um Too unattainable, we would expect to see exactly the type of male marginalization that we’re experiencing in Norway now and that I expect only to get worse. But instead, we’re looking at all kinds of other weird stuff and we don’t want to touch this with a 10 ft pole. But yeah, there’s, I mean, with every reason to think that male stratification on mating markets is the prime driver of the marginalization in today’s societies.
[1:48:18] Michelle: And OK, and but people will not look at it, will not acknowledge it because it’s uncomfortable. And another challenge that I think is this, see, I guess a lot of it to me, it is the challenge of how to blend these different ideologies because a lot of the men who are, um, you know, resorting to porn and gaming and have given up on the dating market, it’s not like, um, it’s not like they are just wanting to pair. bond, right? I think there is this idea of those guys get to sleep around, I should get to sleep around. And so sort of they get, they have the worst of both worlds often, where they don’t, they’re not wanting to become a man who could attract a mate and be and, and shoulder the responsibility of being a husband and a father. They instead are just resentful that they’re not the one at the top. Of the market who’s sleeping with everybody.
[1:49:05] Mads Larsen: Yeah, yeah, uh, the, the, the numbers show that there’s an increasing marginalization, meaning that let’s just make it a, a very simplistic line. Let’s say there’s 20% high volume men and 80% low value men, and we see that for the top 20%, their mating opportunities keep increasing, but according to at least one study, uh, The bottom 80% sees the exact same reduction in mating opportunities that the top 20% experience. So there are fewer and fewer mating opportunities for low value, but other studies show that they at the same time, because we live in such a promiscuous society, and there’s such a high number of single women, they’re mating nature, they’re. Their mating psychology responds by desiring more promiscuous sex. So yes, you’re absolutely right. Also, low value men have this expectation of being allowed to be a part of this wonderful new world that we have where people can sleep around and it’s, and it’s a good thing and it’s fun and then you don’t face social sanctions. It’s just that it’s, it’s not available for them. But that is an environment that also Compels them to place a higher primacy on this and to try harder and to because in the ideology of confluent love is that in romantic love, we’re supposed to self-realize through a lifelong pair bond through the breadwinner housewife model. The confident love we’re supposed to self-realize not only on the long term market, but on the short term market. And if you as a man. Is not able to get laid in today’s world with Tinder. You have no places to hide. You are a loser. In earlier times, you had excuses. If you’re a Mormon man, I would imagine, and you’re not sleeping around, you’re a moral man, somewhat of a hero, perhaps. You’re, you’re a decent man. In Norway, you’re a man and you’re on, and I mean, people know this, they can’t hide. They’re on Tinder. They see that they get no opportunities. They know where to hide. They’re not a good Christian, they’re not a good Mormon. They’re not a moral person or Or they’re not someone who’s fortunate to avoid STDs. They’re just a loser. Someone who’s been marginalized by women, some, somebody whom women consider not to be good enough. And that’s a, that’s a tough blow to your ego that goes very, very deep. Um, so yeah, we’ve just, we’ve just removed the cultural adaptations that allowed men who fill up the short-termating market to still feel kind of good with themselves. And also, as I mentioned earlier, the short-term market is at every point to the long-term market. Before that wasn’t the case. People could sleep around clandestinely and then there was, you know, there’s maybe their family, maybe there’s just that that involved in, in their meeting. So it was kind of like. Um, you maybe didn’t have sex before you got married. That’s not the case today. If you can’t get a woman to bed, she is not going to be your girlfriend. So if you don’t succeed on the short-termating market, you will not succeed on the long-termating market. It’s, and that is, that is hard for men. It’s the amount of competition that we impose on men now, uh, What men have to go through, regular men have to go through to succeed on those markets, it’s hard on them. It’s really hard. And then the, the really ugly part is that those men who are excluded from both short and long term mating, so-called incels, will villainize them. Those men that due to our regime now don’t get access to what can easily be argued the most important parts of life. Well, We paint them as misogynistic potential terrorists sitting in the mother’s basement writing hateful online threads about women. That’s not the case at all. These are the normal men who don’t hate women more than other men. They’re just men who are excluded from mating and instead of showing them sympath, I mean, we’re not going to fix it. Women are not going to start sleeping with them. But as a minimum, we should show them sympathy instead of painting them as evil terrorists. Because, I mean, we’re the ones, this is our mating regime. We’re the one who’s doing this to these men. So at least we could look them in the eyes and say, we’re really sorry and we feel with you, and it sucks that your life is going to be this miserable. Uh, but that’s just the mating regime we have and you have to suffer it, but we feel with you. I mean, that’s not optimal, but at least it’s better to say that they’re evil terrorists.
[1:53:12] Michelle: OK, OK, so I’m thinking about so many things because, yeah, like with our, um, with the Mormon fundamentalist communities, you know, where there is official officially recognized polygamy rather than this de facto default polygamy, we do um we do talk about the Lost Boys with a lot of compassion and, and we see it as a tragedy but I think that we um tend to be still in the standard of of. Um, you know, traditional, when I say traditional marriage, that can mean so many things because I don’t necessarily mean a full-time mother in the home, but I just mean like the idea of, you know, you are pair bonded in a marriage that you are expected that to be the sexual outlet for your life, right? And so we still have this model, so we see that as a tragedy, but what we really have, like, like, we shouldn’t call them incels, we should call them lost boys. That’s what, that’s what it is because these. Um, polygamous relationships always result in the lost boys, and that’s really what we’re talking about. Yeah, it
[1:54:13] Mads Larsen: sounds like, like, like the fundamentalist communities are a lot more compassionate towards low value men than what the modern societies are because we really can’t stand them.
[1:54:24] Michelle: It’s, it’s not the fundamentalist communities. The fundamentalist communities kick them out. It’s those of us that surround fundamentalist communities, the fundamentalist communities kick them out. It’s really, really sad though like these boys that have no training to, um, succeed, um, in, in, you know, in the society they are just like left by the side of the road by their parents let’s
[1:54:45] Mads Larsen: let’s extend. That thought. Look, let’s look into the future. So why do high value men and women put up with low value men? Why do they get to exist? I mean, uh, one of the defining features of Homo sapiens is that we live in multi-male, multi-female groups, yet have pair bonding. No one else pulls that off. Uh, so normally if the high value males, they will hoard the women and chase away the weak men because they want the women to the
[1:55:18] Michelle: they’ll kill them, they’ll send them to war or something, OK, traditionally.
[1:55:23] Mads Larsen: No other species. We don’t pair pair bonding species don’t allow single men to hang around, uh, but we do. Um, And if you look at the modern environment, we need everyone. We live in nation states, nation states need bodies for production and protection. We need them as workers and soldiers. Uh, If we imagine a world and now just to play where where our current ideology might take us, in a world of AI and automation, where we’re not providing materially for ourselves, nor providing our own protection. What incentives would high value men and women have for keeping low value men around? I mean, today in Norway, we need them as tax cattle. Uh, every men pay more in taxes than they receive from the welfare state. Women receive more than 1.2 million over a lifetime that they pay in taxes. So these low value men who are without. Many opportunities they still through their labor, uh contribute to reproduction. If we have the, we have a low value man today, and we in the future are able to, to uh create self-chosen communities because we don’t need, I mean, the nation state is, is, is a construct for our era that we need for historical reasons, and that means having a lot of bodies, but yeah, I don’t, I don’t know why, why would women allow low value men in their communities. In the future if they’re not needed for labor protection. I mean, out of, out of human concerns, that would be nice, but human concerns, it’s a that’s, that’s a euphemism for, for modern Western ideology. And if we transition from that ideology to one more adapted to tomorrow’s environment. We could go in directions that people today at least would find very unpleasant, but which in the future might feel natural for those people that are creating those communities.
[1:57:24] Michelle: That is, that’s, I guess these are the concerns is uh it’s easy to take for granted the values that have been handed down to us by this sort of, um, I mean it is interesting to me that people view it as the church imposed, um, you know, we just need to get rid of these imposed, um, cultural norms that the church has imposed on us without recognizing. I’m not saying that that power structures don’t get tyrannical of of course the church could be too tyrannical, but, but what I think. That is being fail they’re failing to recognize is the problem that the church was solving, right? That like this, these human nature problems that these structures that we just see as tyrannical might be there to facilitate. They might be helping us and blessing us, not controlling us, right? And so we, we throw off the, the shackles that have bound us without recognizing the, really the hellscape that awaits us when we haven’t, you know, when we don’t know what those are protecting us from. The, the, the car. of the of the animals cutting the limb right that they’re sitting on comes to mind that we don’t recognize what we have what we have created and what we’ve done. So I have many other things I would like to talk to you about this. I, I do think one interesting thing is that, um, it is the polygamous societies that don’t have the value for the for the the boys they want to get rid of to save, you know, so that all of the high status men can marry all of the little girls that should be marrying those young men. So they get rid of them. And it’s the society surrounding that um that has compassion for them and one thing that makes me think is that it is so so really in this like in the Norwegian society it sort of is the society that doesn’t have value for those low status men so it would have to be surroundings so it’s it’s very difficult for the society that is in the society itself to have compassion for the for the the the men that are not having mating opportunities just like the polygamist societies can’t have compassion for the lost boys they have to vilify them. Um, enough to be able to justify kicking them out, and it seems like the same thing is kind of happening and, and yeah, who knows where that could go as soon as it becomes logical to.
[1:59:36] Mads Larsen: Yeah, no, that’s a very interesting perspective that because we do have a de facto polygamist regime in the modern world. It is necessary that we villainize. The victims of that order, otherwise we are oppressors. But if we define those men that we discriminate, marginalize, and, and shut out of this market as evil women hating potential terrorists, then we’re doing a good deed by keeping the boot on them.
[2:00:06] Michelle: Yeah, yeah, we can just
[2:00:07] Mads Larsen: so that that’s a very interesting perspective. So yeah, let me offer you an argument for why I think polygyny could be in our future and part of the solution, although I don’t support it personally. So what’s what come up in in the debate that has been raging in Norway for the past half year. Is that women generally mean that find that men aren’t good enough. This is the phrase to keep using. So my point was that when I first wrote, first I came with an article about NSYNC and then the, the bookstores of love from Vikings to Tinder, um. And yeah, by the way, to your uh to listeners, that book is open access. So if you Google stores a lot from Vikings to Tinder and you go to Taylor and Francis it’s the publishers website, you can just download it for free.
[2:00:55] Michelle: We’ll also link below so that people can access it. Just look at the description box and we’ll have the link there.
[2:01:01] Mads Larsen: Wonderful. So. Women’s attraction to men, here we have to understand this difference between the highly discriminous. Promiscuous attraction system and the more egalitarian pair bonding attraction system. That difference between those two with the women that it’s not the same with women, we have to bear that in mind. Oh, Women’s attraction to men evolved in very impoverished environments where having a man was highly useful for calories protection, other reasons. So it, women’s attraction only needed to be strong enough for that environment. In the modern environment, women have become independent and nowhere more so than in Norway. Uh, they have their own jobs that pay more or less as well as men’s jobs, so they can support themselves, and in addition, they get $1.2 million from the government, uh. And
[2:02:00] Michelle: No, wait, let me put that. So even, even not as mothers, they just women are just given money by the
[2:02:06] Mads Larsen: this is on average, this is on average. It’s an average number. So the average Norwegian woman, I mean, I mean, there, there are many women I’m sure who pay more in taxes than they get in benefit, but on average each woman gets 1.2%, over 1.2. OK,
[2:02:19] Michelle: just women are completely independent and don’t need a man for any financial reason. OK,
[2:02:24] Mads Larsen: yeah, and the government. So uh. Men and women have always had two different fundamental evolutionary challenges. For men, the challenge has always been to gain access to female sexuality. It’s always been the main challenge. For women, for the past 4 million years, the main challenge has been to gain access to men’s resources because they needed it. Our offspring became so, so dependent, so needy, our heads got so large. That they needed men’s resources and, and we’ve solved in normal women it’s fundamental evolutionary challenge. They now have create their own resources and they get access to men’s resources through the welfare state. Uh What we, that we would strongly predict that this would result in women finding men less attractive or finding a larger number of men not attractive enough. Uh, women’s love for men, let’s take men, men evolved a love for women so that men would stick around through the pregnancy and the offspring’s most vulnerable years. Uh, women developed a love for men to facilitate access to men’s resources. So it’s not like men and women are are gold diggers who just want men for their money, but those genuine feelings that they have, they evolved to trigger that paternal investment. Uh, so that men’s resources are no longer needed, naturally, men will appear less attractive. So what we’re dealing with now, and, and we see this across the world, that as we gain gender equality, women exclude a larger and larger proportion of men from their potential pool of candidates. And then, if you also have high income inequality, women discriminate more strongly because those men at the top become more valuable. So if we are in a society now, let’s let’s use more an example because we’re we’re so on the forefront in terms of of gender equality and these economic uh mechanisms. When Women don’t need men for their resources. They’re in a very different situations, what our what our feelings evolved for. They can, it’s, and then when we also live in these prosperous societies, we switch to what’s called a slow life strategy, we invest more, we raise our demands, we’re trying to, to get more out of life, to achieve more. And then women will naturally be incentivized to start directing their dating efforts at the most attractive men, and those least attractive men will seem appalling and not worth any effort at all, where it will be better to be single than to be with a man of low value. Given this situation we have created, if more and more men simply aren’t good enough for women. Yes, we could do, uh, do backward looking things that I, I’m very much against. We could impose poverty on people. We could give more money to men to make them more attractive we could, there are all sorts of things we could do to go backwards, but I’m thinking that’s not where we’re headed. I think we’re going to move forwards and, and those things, those trends we see in society are just going to be stronger in the future. So let’s say that. If 50% of men or 70 or 30% of men, if a large proportion of men aren’t good enough, perhaps women want to start sharing men through polygynous pair bonds. What we have today is temporal polygyny. So let’s say if you’re a man in the highest income bracket in Norway, you have a 90% chance of being pair bonded by age 40. If you’re in the lowest income bracket, you have a 40% chance. So instead of women marrying a man, having children, and then being left by him and having the family broken up so he can find a younger woman and then him do the same for a third round later, maybe women want to share these polygamy at the same time so they can keep their families intact. And that’s not for me to say I have no preference. I think that would be terrible for low value men, but if, I mean, women have the power, if this is what they want, and this is what it takes to have them reproduce. perfectly open to women implementing this. So I could see a new role for kind of matriarchal polygyny almost where women call the shots, but where they decide to, to, uh, to share high value men, 234 women. Because they would rather share a high value man than have exclusive access to a low value man that they feel isn’t good enough for them. So I, I, I can see that. I can see that opening for polygyny in the future. Uh, question though is, would these high value men want that? How many modern men want to live in a family with 3 women, I think that’s more limited than what was the case 1000 years ago.
[2:07:08] Michelle: I think, I think that like where I think I would push back on that even as a possibility is the idea of a matriarchal polygyny, polygamy, because um it doesn’t. Um, it, it, it would be hard for me to see a high value man. A high value man is high value because he has the power and that’s why he can attract multiple mates. And what we see with polygamy is it is a power imbalance. The man has the power, the women have less power, which is why we get these, um. You know, in, in fundamentalist communities these ideas of keep sweet a woman’s only value is to is to keep sweet, right? She doesn’t get to have opinions, she doesn’t get to have feelings. I’m curious. I can see what you’re saying if there isn’t a um financial component to it, but I just think it’s so unwise. I, I guess it’s like a woman who is married to a man who then brings on another wife is discarded just as if he had left, right? It, it’s not it’s not like it’s not keeping the family together more than than a divorce would in many ways. I mean, I know that fundamentalists will push back on me, but, but we also have to recognize there’s a huge difference between polygamy and Mormon Mormon fundamentalism that is um. Um, religiously motivated, right? This is, these are gods in the making. These, these men are breathing their way into exaltation, into godhood. And so they have this high value of what this means for them. But even there, um, still, there are these discarded women. Like women have a horrible time even in, in religious polygamy. It’s hard for me to see women being satisfied or men being amenable to. To actual polygamy, it, it seems to re revert. It is like polygamy is a very much misogynistic, um. Society, but actually in a lot of ways, even though, um, this is a lot for me to wrap my head around. I wish that we could talk again in the future after I thought about some of these things before, but really this, this default polygamy is also quite misogynistic in many ways because the high status men are just seeing women as sexual opportunities with no value for the individual woman, right? Yeah, I’ll sleep with her tonight. Who cares? There’s no cost for me, you know, Heather Haying and Brett Weinstein talk about Gamyte sizes, which is really what we’re talking about. It’s the investment. Like our attractions grow out of our investment in in a risk at our investment right for a for a woman sex is a much more costly endeavor than it is for a man which explains a lot of this so these high value men that can sleep with all of these women are quite misogynistic actually right because they’re just taking advantage of the woman without recognizing that the reason the woman is sleeping with them is because of her fantasy of becoming in a pair of of him becoming her boyfriend that’s that’s usually. does that make sense? Like it’s not like we are really egalitarian or feminist in this way of of mating. It is so broken that it doesn’t serve anybody well. And so that’s what I’m trying to, I really wanna tap into that to try to understand better for myself what solutions could be because. I don’t, I don’t, I would, I would rather have more bottom up solutions, more education and empowerment for people and helping them understand rather than um enforcing it through or even not enforcing facilitating through government action, especially when you have a government that is unwilling to even speak the problem like really saying that men who the the lost boys if we want to call them that, that their problem is they’re not feminist enough I like that is just. Insane.
[2:10:48] Mads Larsen: Yeah, in the latest report, one of the few advices they have was that we needed more male nurses.
[2:10:56] Michelle: Oh, great. OK. I mean, that’s great. We can have male nurses, but that doesn’t solve the m. Yeah,
[2:11:01] Mads Larsen: that would solve it. Yeah, we need nurses, so it would solve the nursing, but yeah, not necessarily the mating problem. No, uh, I’m just, I’m just, it’s, it’s interesting to think about given if, if we accept that, I mean, we would expect men to be less attractive now that women don’t need them and women in Norway have been very clear and condescending. And partially hateful and uh in terms of how bad men are. Uh, and if, if we, uh, that’s, that’s just a fact. So if, if men aren’t good enough and if we’re not, if, if women aren’t going to share the high value men through polygyny, maybe cloning then. What do you think? if we do a genocide on the low value men and we clone the good ones, I’ve also suggested if there are any countries in the world where Norwegian women think they are good enough men, I mean, we have a great economy, maybe we can import these men for Norwegian women, but somehow we have to get to the point where we reproduce or we will disappear. So yeah, I don’t know, cloning is, is a bit, it’s, it’s a bit far into the future also, I suspect. So there are, this is what’s one of the fascinating aspects of this. There are no solutions that are palatable. There’s nothing we can do that works that we would be willing to do, which makes it obvious to me that we have to keep this conversation going to find new solutions.
[2:12:23] Michelle: Well, you know what, one thing I think that it is interesting to talk about how like the reason men have become less attractive is because part of what was attractive about a man was he would provide for you, he would protect you, right? That was part of the package that you were getting. And so if we remove that part of it, then. And there’s, yeah, there’s there’s less um that he can bring to the table but still um this recognition of being able to find a man like like I don’t even think this is an individual thing I I think that women and men have a I I what is it I’m trying to say? Still, what men bring to the table is the opportunity to have a pair bond, to have a marriage and to have a family, to have children, right? And so that should be part of what is attractive about men. And I think this, this idea that men aren’t good enough, it really is quite hateful because. This is the fact dating is frustrating like, like, you know, and I didn’t, I wasn’t in the dating market that long. I got married quite young, right? But so the more time you’re spending in the dating market, the more frustrating it can be, but, but you’re not necessarily um. Open or looking for I mean I, I guess, I guess what I’m saying is if you think that that 1% of 1% of men is who you expect to be with and everybody else is not good enough, that is really, really broken. The average man is considered worthless, right? And so, so there has to be a way to help um. I, I don’t know. It just seems like this, this does seem to be, OK, here we are about in the 2nd generation of this sort of promiscuous way of looking for a pair bonding, and it seems that we have, we have come to an evolutionary dead end already, right? This, this can’t reproduce itself. So we have to. Unless
[2:14:12] Mads Larsen: we solve it. It is absolutely an evolutionary dead end. Yes. Yeah, and it’s, it’s with this, um, I have enormous sympathy for women, and I do not blame women at all. Women have no more power over their choices as a group than what men have. So recently, this Norwegian woman wrote in the newspaper that the world has a man problem, making all men responsible for all other men did on the planet. I do not think that way. That tends to lead that, well, that, that, that has a tendency sometimes to lead to genocide. It’s not a, it’s not a good way of thinking about groups. And I don’t think that way about women at all. It’s just that, and, and I’ve had so many female friends that I’ve experienced that if you have spent the last 10 years on Tinder, uh, dating and sleeping around with and socializing with say the top or the top few percentiles of men. Then having to reorient yourself to pair bond with someone of similar value as you have can be so painful. These are men you would immediately swipe left on on Tinder. You would never go on a date with them. You would never consider them for sex. They don’t have the looks, the personality, the charm, the social circles, sometimes the success of those men you’re used to. So then have To stop being with those high volume men to find someone at your own level. It, it, for many women, it feels like you’re selling out, you’re losing yourself, you’re giving up, you’re making an undue compromise. When women have what it does to you to spend 10 years on the mating market with men that are far more attractive than you. I’ve, I’ve, women are able to do it. Most of my female friends have been able to do it, but it, it’s a painful process. I, I, I feel really sorry for them when they have to go through that.
[2:15:57] Michelle: OK, that’s so interesting because I do hear this really um a lot of care about we can’t blame women, we can’t blame women, but there’s not an equal, we can’t blame men there’s like, no, it’s all men’s fault. Let’s go ahead and blame men, but we have to be, I don’t want to blame anyone, you know, I just want to look at it. I like I’m not saying we should blame women. I’m just. It it is interesting how this um ideology is so careful about the feelings of women but has very little empathy like it has very little care for the feelings of men that’s interesting to me why there isn’t more equal care and honestly you know when you had to sell a home. And how painful it is every time you have to cut the price because the the housing market is is is falling out. It’s kind of reminding me of that and I know this is a bad analogy, but you kind of adjust, right? You kind of go, oh, I had unrealistic expectations so I need to adjust because we are, we are like allowed to just say these are low value men but we’re not allowed to say these are lower value women right? that women are dating up and it’s creating a false expectation but there are so many men who you would um. Not like, like on Tinder, you’re not going to recognize their value. When I met my husband, the value that I found in him, I wouldn’t have seen on Tinder, right? And I fell head over heels for him, and we’ve kept our marriage together, even though marriage is hard. Right? And so, and so that’s what is, is unfortunate, is there are different things that people bring to the table. And it’s like I, I don’t know how do we get away from the Tinder dating market? Is it is Tinder really that big? Is that the only way to meet people is and these are the, is the only way to meet people in these really toxic ways that create these false expectations that is now just kind of broken the expectations of an entire society.
[2:17:38] Mads Larsen: Yeah, and on the other side, low value men become bitter. They see high value men sleeping around with dozens and dozens of men, and they see that all their female friends have a limited access to sex. And uh for the large majority of men, they have zero or minimal access to the short term. Well, I would say that
[2:17:54] Michelle: sorry, I’m sorry, I want to hear that, but I would also say the value women become bitter. That’s what I’m hearing in this hatefulness toward men. There is this mutual bitterness of of the people that aren’t at the very top echelons of the dating pool. But yeah,
[2:18:10] Mads Larsen: no, it’s, it’s, it’s, no, no, no, no, uh, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s painful for men, it’s painful for women. It’s, it’s not ideal. Uh, but these are things we can do something about instead of assigning blame, which is, which is, uh, it’s in line with Christian and modern thought, uh, from an evolutionary perspective, I, I think more that, uh, men and women are born with a certain nature that play out differently in different environments, so we have to be careful what kind of environment we create. And the dating environment we’ve now created does not promote pair bonding and reproduction. So yeah, and what we know about how um how the pair bonding attraction system works with women. Uh, women need an opportunity to be around men with similar value over a prolonged period of time so they can discover some of the value that they fall in love with. Tinder does not do that. So then the question is, do we want to create, so if we do want to create new dating arenas, I mean, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna force women at gunpoint to date men at their own level. It’s just that if we can create attractive arenas where men and women can meet as they used to do not that long ago, that would be a step in the right direction. But if you keep Tinder on the side of that, so that women Those, uh, those, those experiences. I mean, for most women, I mean people still people still file partners and have children. For most women, this is not a big problem. Women can sleep around very attractive men and then find a boyfriend later. It’s, it’s not impossible, but we have to look at the totality of it, how it plays out at the group level. And then, yeah, just trying to change the culture in terms of, of, of less dating apps and more meeting people. Um, And see if that over time can create a cultural change. I don’t, even that, even creating that, that would probably just have a minor effect. I mean, it’s, it’s, this isn’t something you can change overnight and, and, and suddenly get a bump back up to 2.1. We have worked on a lot of things and I’m thinking that if we work on these things that are available and we talk about it, over time, we’ll see a cultural change and perhaps perhaps develop new ideology of love uh that. Up values, pair bonding and reproduction. And if we don’t, we disappear.
[2:20:34] Michelle: OK, my gosh, this is so, this is so useful. I, I just can’t help but think that this does kind of keep sounding like almost a toxic marriage, you know, like the men are blaming the women, the women are blaming the men, and we can’t solve the problem because we’re stuck in the blame game on a, on a demographic societal level and that’s, that’s the worst possible way to go about this. But I, I imagine I’m so thankful for the work that you’re doing and for coming and talking to me. I do want to um. Learn more about this. I think it is fascinating and incredibly important, and I guess all, it’s like all hands on deck. What are these solutions going to be? How are we going to
[2:21:14] Mads Larsen: and different cultures, different countries will experiment with different solutions, and most of them won’t work. And I don’t know, maybe you Mormons will come up with a solution, something that is compelling to other cultures as well, so we can adapt uh your adaptations. So, yeah, people should reach into their cultural history to inspire them, to experiment with new solutions, and let’s just see what works.
[2:21:37] Michelle: Oh, I think that sounds great. And let’s stop blaming each other, right? I love, I love your, um, focus on compassion for the downtrodden. It is, it is really sad to see that. Anyway, that was, that was one of the big ahas. I had several ahas in our conversation like discoveries, but this idea that, oh, polygamous societies cannot value the men that they need to discard in order to justify. And
[2:22:00] Mads Larsen: and also it’s important. To have compassion for women in this situation, because if we perform a modern ideological analysis, women are to blame. They have the power, their actions are creating this regime that is leading to self eradication. That’s the logical conclusion, but that’s not how humans work. We’re born with a nature that plays out differently in different environments, and now we have a certain environment. That leaves women as a group with no choice but to act as they do. And then, and nobody here created this environment and those who came before us and we were born into it. And now the question is, what kind of environment do we want to create tomorrow so that we made preferences play out in a way that facilitates reproduction. So individual, and it’s that hatred that women get from certain aspects of some type of the manosphere on online forums for insults, it’s, it’s a really Disgusting and vile hatred. That they should stop with. Men shouldn’t blame women for this because women are just acting out their nature and women shouldn’t blame men. I mean, as, as individuals, of course, we have responsibilities and we encourage individuals to change. But at a group societal level, it doesn’t work like that. We are depressingly uh predictive. So yeah, if you, if you have a daughter or a son or a man or woman that you know is struggling with this, yeah, tell them to get better. Tell them to try harder and compete harder. But on a societal level, harder competition has the adverse effect. The stronger competition there is between men, the more looser there will be. It’s not gonna even the playing field if men try harder. You’re just gonna get stronger stratification the same way you get, um, In economic systems, it’s, and in so many human activities where you have this real distribution that only hardens with competition. So we need a way to roll back the Battle of the sexes and try to find a way together, uh, to create a mating regime that allows us to exist also in the future so that there can be free women also in the centuries ahead.
[2:24:11] Michelle: That is so interesting. Yes, I think that um what you said like like really the thing that is gonna kill us is this resentment we have going on this mutual resentment men blaming women, women blaming men, right? The like the women are blaming the men by saying men aren’t good enough, the men are blaming the women by saying they’re all feminist witches we don’t want, you know, and, and that’s what we have to get rid of and instead find the value of one another and see each other and. Sort of the way that they we’ve all been victimized by this new society with this new dating, um, pool that we’ve set up. It’s just not serving anybody well. And so, and yeah, I think the best that anybody can do in their own individual situation is, is have hope and keep trying. Like for women, don’t give up hope on finding a mate, right? Don’t just. Write all men off as not good enough and for men don’t give up on all women and say they’re all too demanding they’re all too, you know, like do the best you can that’s what we can do for everybody is just keep keep trying, keep hoping that’s I guess part of our religion is, you know, faith, hope and charity. Those do seem to be necessary components of the solution, not, not in a religious way. It just struck me that, oh, maybe that’s part of the answer. But, um, I didn’t, we didn’t get to talk about much about, I did want to talk about kind of the development of, um, of the history of, of human mating strate. And I know, I know people can read about that in your book, right? They can read about sort of this heroic time period that you talk about and how that has developed. So is that, is that where we can go get that? Because I think that this, I was just fascinated by hearing you talk about this 5 to 7000 years ago. I, you know, I, I would love to learn more about that. So. Yeah,
[2:25:53] Mads Larsen: no, that’s I, I covered the, the, the 1st 6 million years covering not too many pages and then the rest of the book is the last 800 years to, uh, what happened after we dissolved your polygynous kinship societies and how that’s set in. Emotion processes of female empowerment and increasing individualism that led us to where we are today, which is the reason why we have cellphones and computers and we talk to each other across the world. That was a, a A product of the transition from polygyny to lifelong monogamy, would not have happened without it.
[2:26:25] Michelle: OK. Well, my gosh, Maz, this has been a fantastic conversation. I’m just so intrigued. So I guess people can keep track of your work by, um, reading your book. What else do you, do you put out, where do you put out your articles? How can people keep an eye on what you’re doing if they want to? Yeah,
[2:26:41] Mads Larsen: just, just go to Google Scholar and search my name and you will get to the page where where my articles are, and you will get uh free access to many of them.
[2:26:51] Michelle: OK,
[2:26:52] Mads Larsen: yeah, thank you so much for the invitation. Yeah, thank you, thank you for the invitation. I greatly enjoyed this conversation. It was uh fun and very interesting, and, and you gave me some new thoughts, so I really appreciate that.
[2:27:02] Michelle: Well, good. Thank you so much, and I will talk to you another time, I hope. I want to sincerely thank Mads Larsson for the incredibly important work that he is doing and for his courage in continuing to sound this warning bell, despite people not wanting to hear it, because it goes against their cultural biases. That’s something I really relate to. I Hope that, um, his work will get more focus because these are important things for us to pay attention to. Another huge shout out to Mats for being willing to get on and talk to me, a Mormon from Utah, while he is, um, at the University of Oslo. I thought this was a very valuable conversation. I hope you all enjoyed it as well. I’ll see you next time.