Analyzing studies on virgins and dating behavior, we break down surprising trends. Contrary to assumptions, porn users and risk-takers are much less likely to be virgins. We argue lack of motivation stemming from external locus of control better explains celibacy, alongside female adaptation to gender ratios that incentivize careers over relationships. Ultimately, we must culturally promote diligence in men and socially engineer maximal coed interactions.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] They'll talk about things like, and you see this constantly like, oh, it's the porn that's making everyone virgins these days. Well, it turns out that they're basically wrong on all these fronts.
Whether or not you watch porn regularly had a huge effect on whether or not you had been able to sleep with someone before the age of 26.
Simone Collins: Just not the way you expect.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah of the people who had slept with somebody 80 percent They use porn regularly, so a bit over 80 percent. Of the people who were virgins, 64 percent. Mhm.
 They found a really persistent trend in the data.
Which was that women when they believed that when in actuality it was true or when they had recently been primed with crowds where there were more women than men chose career pathways instead of marriage pathways [00:01:00] But where this it gets really interesting is the change in gender demographics within college campuses.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: First off, I have to just thank you for being MVP of the day where I am a super distracted and sleep deprived and stressed out and crying. So I go on business calls with her on my back through the park and of course, I don't properly latch the fence and then the professor gets out and I go around trying to find her and I can't and then you just save the day, not only finding the professor.
But also our dog, by the way, our, our dear Corgi giving our son Octavian the best day and experience of the week by introducing him to the park ranger who valiantly. I found the professor and put him in, put her in the car and I'm just, thank you. I really appreciate
Malcolm Collins: it.
Simone Collins: So that was my [00:02:00] bad.
Malcolm Collins: That was my bad. Well, I am excited to be here with you today because today. We are talking about virgins, dating, and what's the cause of the incel
Simone Collins: crisis.
Yeah, I am very excited.
Malcolm Collins: Actually, Simone, I'm going to take a quick aside here. I don't know if I talked over this in a previous podcast. There was a Reddit thread that was on changes in dating behavior.
No. Okay. Well, I can read it because we may have talked about it, but it's relevant to this. My 20 year old son doesn't date. His friends don't date. My friend's kids don't date. What's going on? When I was in my late teens and early twenties, life for my friends and me revolved around meeting girls.
My son and his friends are athletic and outgoing. Don't seem to put a lot of emphasis on dating. They play a lot of online video games and have a lot of boys outings. Once in a while they will hook up with a random girl who they met on an app. Rarely does one have a girlfriend. This seems to be the norm for my friend's kids too.
What's going on? And we [00:03:00] did
Simone Collins: tweet this. And I looked through the comments, and there seems to be a couple of common themes. So, one is and this was what surprised me the most of the comments, something that didn't occur to me before. Several people argued Effectively that there's a balkanization of culture that's taking place that in the past, like, when you and I were in high school, if you were to animate, you weren't to animate.
Whereas now, like. No, you have to like, there are specific obscure shows, like there are all these different subsets of people who are into anime.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, that's BS. This was true when we were in high school as well. If I went to my, like, I, you know, dated around like with punk indie girls and stuff like that, and if you didn't know the right punk indie bands, it wasn't just knowing punk indie bands, you needed to know the right punk indie bands.
So I disagree.
Simone Collins: Okay, another argument was the infantilization of youth, which of course we agree and we talk about that all the time. That's totally an issue.
Malcolm Collins: I think it's more than that. And I think what we learn is causing it is from the statistics because the [00:04:00] statistics don't show what you think you would show.
So there was a study done recently. We're going to talk about two big studies on, on, on various changes in dating behavior, but we'll start with this one.
Simone Collins: Yeah, in the Journal of Sex Health 2021,
Malcolm Collins: it studied about 5, 000 young men, a bit over that who were still, let's be clear, 26
Simone Collins: Swiss young men. And that always makes me look at things a little bit differently.
But the, the study is called for those who want to read it. Virgins at age 26. Who are they? Which I love is the title. It's great. So
Malcolm Collins: a lot of the stuff that they found was very much what you would think they would found. Like obese people are more likely to be virgins. People with more mental health issues are more likely to be virgins.
But there were a few things that were like really, really big factors in the study that I think would really surprise some people. Oh,
Simone Collins: absolutely. This all makes sense to me. Okay, go on.
Malcolm Collins: Well, because [00:05:00] a, a lot of people, if you look at like the red pill sphere and stuff like that, you know, and they talk about what makes someone a virgin, or they talk about like, what are some of the problems that are leading to this?
They'll talk about things like pornography use. They'll talk about things like, and you see this constantly like, oh, it's the porn that's making everyone virgins these days. They'll talk about things like. Dating apps and stuff like that, which we do think has changed female expectations, but they're like, I will find a girl through not engaging with these platforms.
Right. Instead, some of the strong, Oh, and also they'll talk about how guys like, aren't being disciplined enough. Like they're not, you know, they're, they're wasting their lives on like drugs and alcohol instead of like getting out there and dating. Right. Well, it turns out that they're basically wrong on all these fronts.
Whether or not you watch porn regularly had a huge effect on whether or not you had been able to [00:06:00] sleep with someone before the age of 26.
Simone Collins: Just not the way you expect.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah of the people who had slept with somebody 80 percent They use porn regularly, so a bit over 80 percent. Of the people who were virgins, 64 percent.
Mhm. That's a huge
Simone Collins: difference. Yeah. Well, dating apps, right? That, that being less likely to have used a dating app correlates with being a virgin. So if you're using it,
Malcolm Collins: let's talk about dating apps with dating apps. It was 53. 6 percent for non virgins. And then for virgins, it was only 35. 5%.
Simone Collins: And I think this is all pointing to the raw egg nationalist argument, isn't it?
What is that? That, that men are becoming less men because of all the endocrine disruptors that they're subject to this, what these, what these common characteristics indicate isn't a lack of success. It's a lack of drive. They're not even watching porn. They're not even [00:07:00] trying to get on dating apps.
They, and also they're, they're showing other signs of a failure to launch another characteristic found in common. among virgins was that they have they're less likely to have a satisfactory social life and they are less likely to live alone, implying that they still live with their parents. Also less likely to be.
Malcolm Collins: Well, another one is risk taking behavior. They had like way lower risk
Simone Collins: taking behavior. All of this screams lower testosterone.
Malcolm Collins: Well, we can talk to that in just a second, but I think more is at play here. So if you look at something like, have they ever used illegal drugs? It was 17. 7 percent for the non virgin category and only 3.
4 percent for the virgin category. So basically none of the virgins had ever used illegal drugs. It's
Simone Collins: also kind of hard if you're like living with your parents and if you're
Malcolm Collins: like No, hold on. We're going to get to this because I think you're drawing conclusions and I haven't done the reveal yet. Oh, I like reveals.
The reveal will surprise you. So if you look at other things like use cannabis, right? About [00:08:00] 66 percent of the non virgins had used cannabis. Only 21 percent of the virgins had used cannabis. Had it ever had a drunkenness episode? 90 percent of the non virgins. had a drunkenness episode. Only 52 percent of the virgins had a drunkenness episode.
I mean, in fact, this is such an extreme case. It was like 91 percent of you round up that it, it's almost like it is very rare that you are actually going to have slept with someone by the age of 26, if you're a man and you've never gotten drunk. So,
Simone Collins: and a Swiss man, but yeah, I mean, Okay.
Malcolm Collins: But here's where it gets interesting.
Yeah. The financial situation, because I think what a lot of people are looking at, and this is what you hear with all of this whining that we constantly see, which is, Oh, well, it's all the rich guys who are getting all the girls. It's all these, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the rich guys are living on their own.
That's why some people are living with their parents. [00:09:00] Actually the, the difference in satisfaction. First of all, the, the virgin men were more satisfied with their financial situation than the non virgin men. Which is insane.
Simone Collins: I mean, they are more likely to be living at home and that
makes
Malcolm Collins: it easier to be happy with your financial situation.
Yeah. But to me, that was actually pretty shocking. They might be doing like, they're not in this huge financial crisis that other people are talking about. It is a lack of motivation and that could be why they're satisfied too. Is they lack this motivation, like what we are seeing throughout the virgin category is just a persistent lack of motivation and an internal fire to engage
Simone Collins: with reality.
How is that not also an endocrine disruptor thing? I mean, there are multiple factors at play here, but I do think that a lot of this can be hormonally driven. I'll
Malcolm Collins: buy, I'll buy, endocrine disruptor thing
Simone Collins: [00:10:00] if
Malcolm Collins: you want to approach everything from the position of an external locus of control or you could say that we have a generation that's taught an external locus of control and therefore just doesn't even try.
Well,
Simone Collins: and we've also seen like from the research that you pointed to in the pragmatist guide to sexuality, that men who feel like they're losing or men who like philosophically go beta are more likely to have lower levels of testosterone. It's not just an endogenous thing. It's also, I'm sorry. It's not just an exogenous thing.
Sometimes it's endogenous because you are, you, you feel like you're losing. Or you, you've, you've kind of given up or you're, you're living in a more, you know, packed environment. So yeah, okay. It's, it's maybe not just the stuff they're intaking. It could be the fact that they have chosen. To live with their parents and to live a more content life.
But yeah, that's depressing.
Malcolm Collins: This is where I get to things like, I mean, for me, one of the biggest ones that I think would surprise a portion of our audience that is [00:11:00] overbought into the red pill mindset. And they, they're often, I think, very surprised at how promotional we are of. Pornography and stuff like that on this show.
Like we often are pretty stands up, like it's ridiculous to have pornography bands and marriages or even at the societal level, because it just doesn't have good effects anymore. And you can research this. You can look, as I mentioned, if you look at the level of religiosity. Of a zip code that's often directly correlatory with how much porn is actually consumed within that region.
Like the more you put prohibitions on this stuff, the, the, the more like addictive and deleterious it becomes for the individuals who live in these regions, but it doesn't even lead to getting actual sex. Disengaging from pornography makes it much, much, much less likely that you will be romantically successful.
And
Simone Collins: there are a bunch of other things too, like women who consume erotic material are much more likely to be comfortable with their sexuality, blah, blah, blah. I mean,
Malcolm Collins: like, Oh yeah, no, no, no. Just like a cross. Like when we wrote our book, it was one of the [00:12:00] chapters where like, sometimes in a chapter I'll write like, and this is why porn is bad at first.
And then I go into the studies and this happened in this chapter. And then I went into all the studies and the studies are just so overwhelmingly like, and, and people will be like, well, progressives manipulate studies. Look, I'm a very skeptical person. I feel like I'm actually pretty good at ferreting out data that's been manipulated.
Hold on, we came
Simone Collins: into this expecting to find. That, that this consumption was very damaging because we just thought it would be obvious. A lot of people have
Malcolm Collins: tried to prove this. There's like an intuitive drive to believe this. Well,
Simone Collins: so many people online are saying it like it's just obviously true.
Malcolm Collins: Typical incel behavior. And this study shows us involuntary celibates are more likely to have these ridiculous porn restrictions on themselves than people who are actually sexually, sexually successful. Nicer. But now I want to go to the second set of studies that I sent you before so I don't know if you got a chance to look at this, but this was the study on women [00:13:00] choosing jobs over marriage.
Simone Collins: This is wild. I had not seen this ever before. I would not expect this. Go into it.
Malcolm Collins: So it. It was a meta study that looked at this problem from a number of angles. One, it looked at specific experimental data where women would like look at photos of groups and determine how many men and women were in the photos.
And then they would ask questions of them. Like how important is a career to you versus a non career, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Versus a husband, et cetera. And then they did they did this in a few different ways, but then they did a separate set of studies where they looked at data where they were looking at the percentage was in specific regions of men to women and then looking at the number of women who went into specific sorts of careers and specific high paying careers and across the board, they found a really persistent trend in the data.
Which was that women when they believed that [00:14:00] when in actuality it was true or when they had recently been primed with crowds where there were more women than men chose career pathways instead of marriage pathways and built value systems and reported value systems for themselves that elevated career, Over marriage and home life with a husband, kids, et cetera, and when they go, they want fewer kids, everything like that.
Which was fascinating. Another fascinating trend in the data was that the more or the less desirable a woman is the more this affected her. So, the less desirable a woman is, and this makes perfect sense, right? Like if she's trying to protect herself and everything like that. But where this it gets really interesting is the change in gender demographics within college campuses.
You know, we are now, and I think it's continuing to climb at like 65 percent women on college campuses. So we are. Throwing women into an [00:15:00] environment where we already have this fertility crisis that is going to, and we know this from the data, make them instinctually much less likely to want to have a family and to change their value system to be much more focused on career because we have thrown them at this critical time of their lives when they really need to be locking down husbands into environments, which changed their perception of like viable life pathways.
So I wanted to hear your thoughts on this.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, a lot of this, I always think when I look at studies affecting youth and outcomes like these, I think of our children. And then I think, okay, well, how, how are we then going to give our girls an experience that is going to make them think that marriage is viable for them?
And I wonder, I wish I could see arranged marriage. Obviously arranged marriage. Yeah. Where like parents are very, very involved in sourcing and vetting and everything else. Cause I think it's, that was big in the past and it's not big now. But I, I do wonder if like our girls may be [00:16:00] having a higher ratio of male siblings would influence that, like if they grow up more around boys but I mean, it just, it just makes so much sense evolutionarily speaking, like if, if women realize that the competition is really intense and that they're just not likely to get a good male partner, it's definitely better to find out how to make Your own resources because you're not going to
Malcolm Collins: get someone goal of doing this is to still sleep around and get pregnant, which they're not doing.
I mean, from an evolutionary perspective, it's don't expect on a monogamous partner to support you, but do still
Simone Collins: get pregnant yourself and yeah, probably also have kids, but no one's
Malcolm Collins: doing that on the second part, you know, but we've had our video on, you know, 50 percent of, of people born these days are now born to single mothers when it used to be 5%, it just.
You know, 30, 40 years ago. So I guess we are seeing a lot of women choosing this pathway. Involuntarily or involuntarily. Yeah.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it does. It does make me wonder like how, how to get [00:17:00] women around this and in what, in what environments today, realistically. Are women going to see a higher ratio of men, I guess, engineering schools.
Malcolm Collins: No, they need to start going to more you know, D and D events. They need to start going into more Warhammer. Well, no, actually. So, this is a phenomenon I've noticed where women who hang out in predominantly male spaces are either like complete psychos are really cool. And I think it's what drew them into those spaces.
Typically the attractive women I know who hang out in male dominated spaces are generally pretty cool. And it's because they, they didn't go into those spaces because they were playing an arbitrage game. But I do know this separate class of what I'd call like, Oh, what is it on that? I forget the name of the band, triple X.
Like,
Chubby chin, chubby cheek, chubby thigh You have been with too many guys
Malcolm Collins: a famous song from when I was growing up. Oh boy.
And I do not like [00:18:00] your very big thighs Besides, you have been with too many guys
Malcolm Collins: which is that there's this sort of like overweight, otherwise unattractive Really sexually aggressive type which enters predominantly male spaces and then attempts to control them because they now have this arbitrage play to, to, to play.
And they cause a lot of social unrest in these spaces, which makes a lot of sense. I mean, if, if, if it's a, it's a good play. Honestly, if you're an unattractive woman and you want to take advantage of men, go into environments. And, and this is a thing where, you know, you get a lot of gatekeeping in these environments and women are like, why is there so much gatekeeping in these environments?
I feel angry. It's because a lot of women have tried to exploit these environments for their benefit. I
Simone Collins: mean, I've always seen women who. Play that game. Like the gamer girl as being kind of a hated group. Because a lot of it was seen as insincere [00:19:00] and, but I mean like the famous ones online were also hot.
So I don't know if you're, you know.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that if they're famous online, that's a completely different category. That's an incredibly small minority of people that went into the space. But generally what I've noticed is the hot ones that didn't need to enter the space, but did because they liked it, which, which you often see with the hot ones is more common.
They're generally pretty cool and they'll, they'll downplay it a lot. Well, do
Simone Collins: you think women in the military who, who serve in the military, which is, I think, a more male environment, Are more likely to get married because I don't super get the impression that that's the case, but maybe there's too many confounding variables there.
Malcolm Collins: I think there's too many confounding variables. Well, where would we put our daughters? Like, where would we try to socially engineer them to hang out? I think the goal for us is actually just put them in STEMI, ultra nerdy sort of, well, ultra
Simone Collins: high [00:20:00] agency hobbies. Like if you're starting a business, unless you're in like one of those going nowhere, female business support groups, which we would never put our daughters in because they don't.
Do anything. You're predominantly around men, you know, investors are mostly men. And you know, investing related groups are mostly, mostly men if they're actually getting anything done. I, I just, I mean, there are so many female entrepreneur groups out there, but I actually find that those are like kind of a cesspool.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, they totally are. Well, I used to go into them to pick up girls and I never got good girls at the female entrepreneur
Simone Collins: events. Well, and also like, I don't know if I. I'm aware of companies that have come out of these that have done famously. Well,
Malcolm Collins: yeah, the girls who I know who started successful companies they did not go to the female
Simone Collins: entrepreneur events.
Yeah. Once you know, obviously she's not a great example, but Elizabeth Holmes, like when. You know, full [00:21:00] out on the other end, even
Malcolm Collins: acting like Amanda Bradford. This is one who we knew personally. Right. You know, she, the league, she recently sold it to the match group. She never went to these sorts of events.
In fact, she didn't really socialize that much at all. She was you know, kind of isolated. Honestly, I think a lot of umbrage. She kind of, we were friends early in my time at the GSB. And then she started, like, Just shunning me, but I think it was because I was known as like weird and uncool by the the quote unquote cool kids
Simone Collins: There was this really like catty group of people at Stanford that I think just thought they were too cool.
The be Yeah. And that, yeah, that would like go on their little like retreats and stuff, but only invite like other cool kids and .
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I didn't get invited to that stuff. I've, I've never been what? Good at being one of the cool kids. It's okay. You. We, Hey, I won. I don't, I don't, I don't know if their lives are as good as mine.
I don't doubt it.
Simone Collins: I don't know anyone who has a life as good as ours. Our life is [00:22:00] incredibly good. It's really fun. Look at this. Look at what we're doing right now. This is ridiculous, but yeah, no, this, this was interesting to me. And I just never heard this example of like adaptive female behavior based on group composition.
And it makes a lot of sense, but it's also sobering given what you said, right? That like, there are so Well, not just colleges to like a lot of bureaucracies are predominantly female, like a lot of pretty powerful organizations are becoming quite female dominated. So this is not going to drive pronatalist behavior, which is also disappointing because, you know, highly educated, conscientious, high achieving women are probably also going to be pretty decent mothers.
I would think so. It's a disappointment.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I just think the goal for us is to put our girls into male dominated spaces as much as possible. [00:23:00] Well, what are you going to do with our
Simone Collins: boys to make sure that they're not. obese and still at home and not watching. Are we going to be like, what's your porn watching?
Malcolm Collins: I mean, I think focus them on being incredibly high internal locus of control. And, and sort of gives them agency in terms of starting careers and stuff like that. If you focus on that stuff, I think they'll do well, especially if you give them good social training in terms of how to meet and talk to random people.
Because I think it's the outreach and the fear of rejection that which is where these people are failing. And I think that those are areas that we can fix and build community. I mean, that's why we're so focused on community building. Honestly, this channel takes a bit of a hit with all of our community building attempts in terms of theology and stuff like that.
But we don't really mind because one of our core goals is to build this hermetically sealed zone of, of, of sanity where our kids can be culturally safe. And that involves cultural [00:24:00] outreach. One thing I was going to mention that I thought you'd find pretty funny is the professor just snuck her way in.
And when Octavian was out, this is our dog looking for the professor, because you were talking about this at the beginning of the episode he goes, he goes, Oh, Dada, I think professor is a meatball now. I think she ran in the road and died. I was calling and he kept going, Dada, Professor's a meatball now.
Oh my
Simone Collins: god, he didn't seem sad?
Malcolm Collins: He was a little concerned. No, he wasn't like happy about it. He was like, Dada, Professor's a meatball now. Like trying to console me. He couldn't deal with the fact that the professor had turned into, because he knows, I tell him, if he goes into the road, he's going to turn into a meatball.
Oh,
Simone Collins: that's where this is coming from. I'm like, where did he figure that out? He's going to turn into a meatball? I mean, it's not untrue. He
Malcolm Collins: thinks the professor has turned into a meatball. Well,
Simone Collins: you know, actually it's so annoying when this happens, but like the next time a deer is [00:25:00] killed, we need to just like show him death.
Malcolm Collins: No, I agree. Yeah, he needs to internalize. I mean, I was actually thinking if she did die in the road, I'd really make him like, look at it and internalize it. So he'd understand why we tell him not to run into the road. Yeah.
Simone Collins: I mean, yeah. Cause it's legit dangerous.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I mean, we're, we're, I mean, we're right next to a major through fair, you know, a kid could
Simone Collins: easily, it's a state route.
Yeah. We are on a proper state group. Okay. Pretty fast traffic, so not safe, not safe, but I, yeah, I'm really sorry that I. Could have been responsible today
Malcolm Collins: for the dog dying. Yeah. Apparently she was down by the road.
Simone Collins: She's so smart. And yet, how could she do something so dumb? She doesn't know about the road.
So
Malcolm Collins: don't make meatballs out of our, our pupsters. I
Simone Collins: thought the gate was locked. I'm sorry. [00:26:00] Thank you for saving the day. You are amazing.
Malcolm Collins: You are amazing. You have saved the day in so many ways. You read the comments when I'm embarrassed to read them, you I, I don't, I can't deal with, like, I struggle so much in engaging on social media and stuff like that because, you know, I, I don't like rejection.
I don't like, you know, when people are like, oh, this is a dumb idea, especially if they have a good argument. So I try not to engage with it, even when they don't have a good argument. You know, we get a few negative things and I'm like, okay, no more tracks anymore. I'm done with that. I'm being way too vulnerable in these.
I'm taking it way too seriously. And That's
Simone Collins: what I like about it. And so many people, and this is like, not in just religious zones, but so many people in all realms of life are completely unwilling. To share their work as they go along, to expose their thought processes, to say potentially dumb stuff as they're working things out and thinking aloud.
And yet this is how people deliberate.
Malcolm Collins: [00:27:00] And I mean, that's the famous thing with like, it's funny, all of these bio nerds, this is a famous trend. You know, whether you're talking about Gregor Mendel or Darwin or you know, people who don't know the story of Gregor Mendel, like his work was discovered like 50 years after he died.
By somebody else. And they were like, Oh, this guy basically figured out heredity like long before, but he was embarrassed that people would make fun of him. And so he didn't want to talk about it. And so he published it pretty obscurely. And then Darwin sat on his work for decades. Because he's like, I don't want people to tease me about this.
So, you know, I, I guess it's a trend of those of us who are really like science brain to be a bit afraid of talking about any of the ideas that could get us shunned by communities.
Simone Collins: Yeah. But then what amazing inventions and great ideas and, and breakthroughs are we not enjoying as a society because someone took that to the grave?
It bothers me. So thanks for being brave enough [00:28:00] to put shit out there. I
Malcolm Collins: appreciate it. I really appreciate it, Simone. I'd do none of this if you didn't, you know, one support me in, in terms of, you know, helping move our companies and, and, and projects forwards, but also support me emotionally in terms of going into the comments and I'm like, it's important to check the comments today.
This video could be spicy.
Simone Collins: Oh, well, I appreciate that. Thanks for also not hitting me for messing things up constantly. So I love you, Malcolm. I love you
Malcolm Collins: too. Have a great day. Me too.
Male Virginity Stats & What Happens to Women When Too Many Women are Around?