Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the controversial topic of infidelity, exploring the evolutionary psychology behind why people cheat. This thought-provoking discussion covers:
Various evolutionary theories on why women cheat
Surprising statistics on infidelity rates across different demographics
The impact of age, business travel, and previous relationships on cheating behavior
How modern technology and dating apps influence infidelity
The difference between male and female cheating patterns
Cultural and biological factors influencing fidelity
The concept of "mate-switching" and its evolutionary basis
How postmenopausal sexuality might differ from premenopausal sexuality
The role of emotional vs. physical affairs in different genders
Whether you're interested in evolutionary psychology, relationship dynamics, or simply curious about human behavior, this video offers fascinating insights into one of society's most taboo subjects.
[00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today Today we are going to discuss the topic of why women cheat
Simone Collins: Ooh la la, have I done something?
No, I was watching a Chris Williams episode and he was interviewing a psychologist about this and the psychologist, honestly, I, I thought I didn't really agree with his interpretation of this particular question, but it got me thinking about the question from an angle.
That I hadn't thought about it before. Oh,
Simone Collins: interesting.
Which is not, why do specific women cheat? Okay. Why do women cheat at all, period? Like what, why is the, the, in, in human beings across cultures, you see cheating as a behavior pattern. Why do you see it cross culturally in humans? And isn't it
Simone Collins: pretty high?
I feel like Ayla did numbers on this at one point, and I was actually shocked by the proportion of both men and women that cheat.
We're going to go into the numbers. We're going to go into the numbers. We're going to go into how they differ [00:01:00] by ethnicity. We're going to go into how they differ by culture.
We're going to go into, Oh, you're going to get so much. But the point I'm making here is not all monogamous animals cheat. Um, So some animals that are mostly monogamous. Basically almost never cheat. Do swans almost never cheat? Well, I'll give you some that almost never cheat. Black vultures. Will the black
Simone Collins: vultures faithful?
Extra pair of fertilization in black vultures. California mice. DNA analysts suggest wild California mice have extremely low rate of extra pair of fertility. And I didn't know there was such a thing as
Simone Collins: California mice. Eurasian beavers. Okay. Geographically specific. It's just Californian mice.
I'm naming species here and by species, you're going to get different patterns.
Here's an interesting one. This is, this one's not going to be as funny for you because it's not the coyotes. Coyotes have a study of urban coyotes have found 100 percent monogamy over a six year period with no evidence [00:02:00] of any cheating. They're urban,
Simone Collins: so you'd expect them to be more
polyamorous. They're very urban, right?
You'd expect them to be polyamorous by now, right?
Simone Collins: Bizarre.
Macaroni penguins? And
Simone Collins: Atlantic puffins? Do they have, do they have top hats, Howard? What? Are macaroni penguins? Anyway, I need a picture of this. Those crazy looking penguins. The things. Oh, yeah, the ones with the little feather crowns.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Simone Collins: Okay, okay. They aren't, so they do wear hats.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: Okay,
so historically, the most believed hypothesis, and it's the one that we argued for in our book, for the predominant reason women cheat, is to get better genes. This is the Beta, Bucks, Alpha, Fs strategy. This is the, I have a provider. Who I know is going to raise my Children, [00:03:00] but frankly, I can't secure a high value male who will invest in me, but most high value men, at least in a historic context, this is before child support.
And we often talk about the genetic effects of child support, not super positive. But before child support With a risk, historically, a man, and we'll get into the stats of how often this happened historically in a bit would just sleep with other women. Right. You know, so I, I, I, as a woman might only be able to get some fairly average looking, some fairly average competence man, but in terms of, you know, what I actually want, I want the powerful Lords kids.
I want the, or the person who has shown themselves to be You know, an amazing night and who is buff and who is fit and everything like that. But he's never going to settle down with a woman like me, but he, screw me. Right. You know, well, it didn't,
Simone Collins: aren't there some, there was a study at some point that found that women who were ovulating were more attracted to men who looked more Chad.
Yeah. So that's, that
was a part of this story is that that study has kind of [00:04:00] been debunked and that was a core scene as a core piece of evidence supporting this, but I, I want to go to you here. And say, you were telling me earlier about how, like all of these female romance books, it's always like, they don't talk about the personality, it's just how much power the guy has.
Simone Collins: Yes. Can
you talk about that?
Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah. A really weird thing that I realized after talking with Malcolm about sort of a common characteristic I've noticed of women in erotic material is, you know, it's, it's Really their sentiment, their enthusiasm, their, their, their kind of their personality to a great extent is a selling point.
Whereas in all of these romance novels, and I've gone through so many, I like reading romance novel reviews more than I like reading romance novels, which is really interesting. And also seeing how they're tagged. And. It does not matter if they are good people or bad people. It does not matter if they are kind or mean.
What matters is that they are dominant, especially high class as [00:05:00] perceived by society. So that could be that they're a mob boss. It could be that they're a billionaire. It could be that they are a fairy Prince, but they are high in the hierarchy and they have chosen for whatever reason. The female protagonist who typically is extremely annoying, but they had no, there's like no person.
There's very little exposition into their personality. There's not really a lot of description of it. Maybe they're a little cold, you know, like the only the only elements of their personality seem to have to do. With their dominance and status. So there's nothing beyond that. There's nothing like, Oh, he's like, he is really into knitting or, you know, he, he laughs whenever he sees dogs vomit.
I don't know, but like, I don't, I don't know how to describe people's personalities, obviously.
But it is interesting that women are actually quite superficial in what arouses them. And we talk about this in the pragmatist guide to sexuality, which is people are like, Oh, women are like, Not that sexual and men are really sexual like they look at porn consumption rates in men and the amount of time when you look at the
Simone Collins: romance novel industry, you discover that, oh my gosh, women are [00:06:00] very,
yeah, if you include erotic fan fiction and romance novels, porn consumption among women, women is almost exactly equal publicly for the love of
Simone Collins: God.
I mean, about it, like it's okay.
Yeah, well, it's a social thing for them, which is also interesting, right? Like there isn't the same stigmatization. Around talking what, you know, they're clearly getting off to that's, that's what they're doing when they're the 50 shades of gray. It's not for the story, right?
You know, this is a smut, you know, it is, it is a designed predominantly to arouse me. I
Simone Collins: actually tried to watch, I didn't, I couldn't read it, but I tried to watch 50 shades of gray to like comment on it in a podcast. For, that we did. I literally couldn't make it through. It was so bad. It was that boring too.
And the characters were that uninspired. That, it just, it's, it's really, it's awful. And so yeah, there is this sort of one note power dynamic thing going on. And
so, this one note power dynamic would support two of the potential, well, maybe more than [00:07:00] two of the, Actually all of the potential theories. It doesn't actually solve anything for us.
Yeah. But so, so better genes is one hypothesis. Okay. This was believed a long time in the field as like the predominant strategy, because one study reported to show that women, depending on their stage of the cycle when they were more fertile, preferred men who were more Like masculine and, and, and more of this like alphas type.
And when they were less fertile, they preferred men who were more resource providers for them and caring and everything like that very much. This, this, this dynamic, and that would have been created by evolution. If that had been a strategy and the mechanism of action of that strategy. The problem is.
Is when we wrote the pragmatist guide to sexuality, it had the initial studies debunking, it had come out, but like they hadn't been accepted as mainstream yet. And it had been like the mainstream perspective in the field for so long. I wasn't going to like throw it out. Now the, the, the studies that are more robust, they have been replicated.
And it appears [00:08:00] that that does not happen. Now I need to note here. That does not mean that women. From an evolutionary perspective, we're not engaging in this behavior. It just means you didn't have this mechanism of action promoting the behavior of the time of cycle in a woman. So note there. It also is interesting that you could even argue that hidden fertility in women At all, could be a signifier that women were doing this strategy.
So this is actually one of the big mysteries of human sexuality. In most other primates, a woman's period when she's fertile is pretty heavily signaled, like giant red butts or something like that, that they don't have during other periods of their cycle. But in humans, it's covert. You as a male, are going to struggle to tell if a woman is fertile or not fertile, depending on the way she appears to you.
Simone Collins: Well, I mean, unless she's on her period, in which case it is technically possible to get pregnant, but [00:09:00] very unlikely, but still, and that you kind of know that the odds are extremely low.
Okay. So, this is likely to ensure that the sexual capital of a woman is preserved across all periods of her fertility window, which indicates that some of these strategies.
May have been at play here, but we'll get to some of the other, the predominant strategy after this one, after the Oh, they're going to cheat strategy was a strategy that said the predominant where reason women cheat is because they are looking for a better partner. I E a woman cheats when she thinks she can secure a partner who is better than her last partner.
And they use this as like a, Interstitial period. And this is
Simone Collins: what I hear most from at least 10 years ago. What I heard most when I hung around red pill communities, that this was hypergamy and this was why women cheated and left whenever they saw a better option, they just hop onto it.
Yeah, potentially.
So. And here I would note some dumb [00:10:00] reasons why people say, so some people really hated these two strategies, like some feminists did. Originally feminists loved these strategies, they were the best, because it gave women agency, right? Like, but then they started hating it because they're like, it paints women in a bad light.
So they came up with this genuinely insane strategy that women were cheating for genetic variability. This was a
Simone Collins: feminist theory for why women cheat.
Yeah, that like women were better off having more genetic variability in their offspring. Oh,
Simone Collins: okay. So, okay, to have different baby daddies for all their children because if, if they happen to reproduce with one man who just had two.
terrible cancer risk. At least that was only passed on to one of her children.
Yeah, except the problem is that if you're doing the math of genetics, right? Genetics doesn't exactly care about you as an individual, right? So, Because it all washes out in the math, it actually doesn't matter if you had the kids with one partner or with multiple [00:11:00] partners.
Do you, do you understand why that would wash out in the math? So, as me as an individual, right, I have statistically increased the odds that one of my offspring will survive if my partner had whatever, whatever. Potential disease, but the individual gene hasn't by that, what I mean is if I have five kids with one guy and five kids with another guy.
Okay. And I'm choosing from a pool of a thousand men. All right. And half of the men in that pool this, this gene that ends up with their children dying. If your kids get it right. And the other half of the men in that pool of a thousand men don't have that gene. Okay. And now me as a woman, I have two sets of potential genes.
One gene says cheat. One gene says have 10 kids was one guy. Statistically speaking, these functions actually get passed on at exactly the [00:12:00] same rate, because genes don't care about you as an individual, okay?
Realized this might still be confusing for people. So I'll explain the math here in another way. The probability that a gene gets transferred to the next generation is determined by the percentage of the children that the average carrier of that gene both has and survive.
So we're going to put women into two categories, one category, 50% of their genes, or with one guy, 50% of their genes. They're with another guy. This is called category one. The second category, we're going to call it category two. They always have all of their kids with one guy. Okay. And so we're going to assume to make the math easy that each of these women always has 10 kids.
And we're also going to assume to make the math easy that guys exist in two categories, X and O If you have kids with an X guy. , those kids all died for a genetic reason. If you have kids visit, oh guy, those kids all survive. All right. So if you are a type one woman where [00:13:00] 50% of your kids is one guy, 50% of your kids with another guy. You have three types of pairings, you can have, you either have a, an ex pairing where you have 50% of your kids with the next guy in 50% of your kids with an oh God, you have an X, X pairing. , and you have an O O pairing. All right.
So how many of your kids are going to survive on average 50%? All right, now you have a category, two pairing here. And the category two pairing, , you are monogamous, right? So you either have, , all of your kids are of the XX variety or the O O variety, right?
Because that's the only thing you have. Right. All of your kids are. With an X or was it now? How many of your kids survive? 50%. This does nothing to increase the survival odds. . Of a gene, it might increase the survival of your genes, but it doesn't do anything to increase the genetic selection pressure on aging.
I don't need to go further on the math on that.
It's just like an interesting little math thing. So it doesn't make sense. And even if you think about like [00:14:00] the marginal utility of this, it's just the marginal utility isn't that high. You know, especially when you consider the cost of cheating, which infanticide and stuff like that, men seem to have an infanticide instinct towards kids who are not their own non biological children living with a man have three X the rate of dying.
You know, Who knows why that's happening but we do know that our nearest ancestors, if you look at apes you know, often when they move in to get the women fertile again and to not care for another man's kids, they'll take the cubs and they will smash them on rocks. And then we can look at civilization developing.
What does the Bible say to do to the young children of the areas that you conquer? It says smash them on rocks. So this is a, we see it in our, Evolutionary ancestors. We see it in the earliest writings of what you're supposed to do when you conquer a territory that we have access to and it doesn't exactly make the Bible look good to keep this in it.
So I'm assuming that, yeah, humans have an instinct, an infanticide instinct, which makes the behavior really risky. And you are at least pretending to be monogamous. Yeah,
Simone Collins: [00:15:00] yeah.
So. That's, that's a ridiculous theory and I just need to note the ridiculous theory there and put it off to the side. So, mate switching is the next theory that they go to.
Maybe. What does mate switching
Simone Collins: mean? What, I mean, that's what cheating is.
Mate switching is the one I just described, where they're looking for a better mate. Oh, okay. They're looking for a better mate than their existing mate. And, but I've definitely heard this from women, right? When, when women talk about why they're cheating.
Simone Collins: I've never heard that, but okay.
I have seen people do it with me when I slept with people who had existing partners back when I was, you know, sexually immoral. And I didn't really understand why sexual morality mattered. Or just mate with whatever. I didn't, you know, I was a kid. It's like, yeah.
Simone Collins: So they, so what you, okay. You were the other man. Women were cheating on their boyfriends with you, right? Yeah.
And so I was telling you, some of them, I actually, I'd say it was pretty clear to me. The, well, they, they, they, what we'll get to is, is they seem to do it for all of these reasons. Some of them just were clearly [00:16:00] like, you're better genetically than my partner.
And I know I never could get a guy like you. So thank you for dating to sleep with me.
And then others were like, um, clearly trying to upgrade to me. to, to build a relationship with me. And you can tell pretty quickly.
One of the challenges when studying sexuality is a core source of information we have on sexuality. Is our own arousal patterns, but the problem is, is human arousal patterns are highly variable. And so I can go out and collect lots of information like I did in the. Pragmatist guide to sexuality, which we wrote. But at other times, , when I don't have a big survey in front of me, I just have to guess based on my own arousal patterns. And I just noticed something when I was going over this. Which is that. When I was sleeping with somebody else's partner. Oh, my.
My hotness standards would be lower. Then they were otherwise, , because they were [00:17:00] positively augmented. I E I gained more arousal from knowing I was sleeping with somebody else's partner than I gained from. , knowing I was sleeping with a partner that I had locked down. , it's funny. Just if anyone's like, oh, you're such a weirdo for saying this.
Trump has said the same thing. , so at least I know that I, and Trump have this arousal pattern. I suspect more guys might as well, because it would have been highly biologically advantageous that you are willing to make compromises on the genetic fitness of an individual. When it is unlikely that you are going to have to raise the kids that you had with that individual. Which is really interesting because I haven't seen that talked about in men.
But others were in the next category, which Robin Hanson actually came up with this category, which is information gathering.
Maybe they don't really know their sexual marketplace value. And they're trying to gauge what sort of partner they can get. Maybe they're trying to learn what. Ummm, so here's what sex is like. This was actually a core strategy for me [00:18:00] is that girls knew I was really discreet, in way to recommend their friends to me as a way to gain sexual experience so that they didn't embarrass themselves when they had their first time.
Um I think a lot more girls do this than guys know! And this is like a WHY?! You know, you shouldn't try all this dark triad stuff, you know, just be a decent human being, but also naturally dominant. Maybe that's a rare thing. Um,
And when I say be a decent human being here, I mean, Being nice to women and treating them with respect. I do not mean decent in an absolute or moral sense. Obviously. Sleeping with other people's partners., or sleeping with a girl who you know, is about to go on a date and sleep with this guy who she likes for the first time.
So she can try out sex. That's not a decent thing to do. Like I was not being a moral person back then. But I didn't contextualize it that way back then, because back then I was urban monoculture. , I had this utilitarian ethic sense, [00:19:00] which is to say maximize the amount of positive feelings in the world.
, and that makes me a good person and what somebody doesn't know doesn't hurt them and them having sex with me and me having sex with them. That feels good. Therefore, I have increased the amount of positive. Experiences in the world. And I don't need to think about what I just did. Uh, But anyway that is something that, that some women definitely do. The next is investment strategy.
So, the classic example of the investment strategy is a woman's essentially just trying to get investors. So you can think of this as a woman who has a kid and spends her day as a prostitute. Like, why is she doing that? Cause she wants money for the kids. She's not really trying to get pregnant from these other guys.
But you actually see this a lot where it's been studied in African tribes infidelity behavior. The investment strategy appears to be the predominant thing. When people are subsistence living getting that marginal additional income is incredibly important.
Simone Collins: And
so, that, that makes sense to me.
Now I guess
Simone Collins: you could argue that. [00:20:00] Many women, they may not actually be having sex with other men, but they may be in a relationship and then against their partners, their monogamous partners knowledge and perhaps preference, they may be on OnlyFans, for example, making money on the side.
Yeah, well, and I, and I think here interesting I haven't mentioned this yet, but people might be asking, why aren't I asking why men cheat from an evolutionary perspective?
There is no question as to why men cheat. It is obviously in a male's best interest if they are living in a world where some women are willing to cheat to cheat because me sleeping with another person and getting them pregnant does not lower the number of kids I can have with my dedicated partner, my wife, right?
In
Simone Collins: other words, men who Took the opportunity when they got it, had more surviving offspring, and therefore, you know, that's a trait that is going to be evolved into a population. Yeah,
I've got to put the South Park thing here
. As you've all seen on the news, our country is facing a major [00:21:00] crisis why? Why are rich, successful men suddenly going out and trying to have sex with lots of women? Why would a man who's famous Use that to try and have sex with lots of different women! And these rich celebrities have perfectly good wives at home! Why would they even think of sex with others? Dammit! I want answers! . Of course, we all know the normal healthy male thinks only of sex occasionally and has no desire for sex with multiple partners. Yeah, that's right, of course. Definitely true. Yes, we all know that.
Go on.
Men cheat when they have the option to, if they don't feel that if they feel often that they can get away from it, is generally when men cheat.
For me, like, I have noticed that the desire to cheat has basically gone away entirely since I started having lots of kids with you. And I think that's just because I'm like, oh, it's just not worth any, Individual risk to cheating for me anymore from a biological perspective. It sort of recoded my brain.
But You know, there's [00:22:00] there's just less desire right like um, and I think that that that also makes sense from a biological perspective But women women can't necessarily have more kids by cheating Right, like they they women's fertility can't be Presumably, if they stay with their husband and he is a healthy male, they should be able to max out their lifetime fertility window.
Simone Collins: Although I guess there are examples in history of women who did know that the, it was a male factor and fertility issue, in which case they would. This was the next reason, sterility. Oh, okay.
So women may cheat have a desire to cheat for the rare instance they're in their partner is sterile.
And this also would likely increase women's instinct to cheat within our existing environment. Because I suspect if you look at things like, you know, people talk about what is it like the, the two year itch, the seven year itch, et cetera. Right. I suspect we have sort of pre programmed into us the instinct to know when our partner might be sterile.
And if [00:23:00] you have been sexually active with somebody for a two year period and they are not pregnant, it means probably sterile. And if you have been sexually active for a seven year period and they're not pregnant, it They are 100 percent sterile, or you are, and it makes genetic sense for both of you to try new partners.
This is why I think modern relationships just don't really work, because people aren't having kids and the relationship's supposed to transition to the next phase.
Simone Collins: Hmm. Interesting.
Here. I wonder if this is part of why polyamory has become so common in our major cities. Eve you have an environment where the vast majority of people are childless or functionally childless, because this isn't something. I think people don't understand if you have one kid or two kids, you're functionally childless from an evolutionary genetic perspective. , a lot of people are like, well, what do you mean?
Like you, you know, you have a lot of kids with your partner and then sired a cheek goes down and it's like, yeah, if your partners regularly having kids, but a lot of these celebrities, you know, they have two kids or one kid and from a [00:24:00] biological perspective, If you're talking about like our evolutionary context with how many of your children were likely to die. That's basically no kids. So, I wonder if., These incredibly low fertility environments cities. , if everyone doesn't at a biological level, see their partner is sterile and that's why they're all desperately going out and sleeping with lots of other people.
And then I have to ask, well, in a low fertility environment, does that mean polyamory is a stable relationship option.
, I mean, it's, it's, it can be intrinsically unstable, but it might be more stable than monogamy where you biologically assume your partner is sterile. So, the, the final reason why women might be doing this is protection, protection for their existing kids. This has been killing the children of women.
It's actually like kind of common in a lot of tribes. So if you study a lot of anthropology, I like reading anthropology texts. You'll often read of like a guy will get mad at a kid and just randomly kill them. They are less like
Simone Collins: [00:25:00] your own children. Okay,
And if they're like a successful hunter, there's nothing you can do about that.
They'll like the kid annoyed me. You know, And however, in those tribes, they're less likely to do that if they think the kid might be theirs. So women will sleep with these guys. Well, for plausible
Simone Collins: deniability of like, maybe this little shit's mine. He pissed me off, but I am not going to kill him.
Yeah.
Simone Collins: Oh, interesting. Okay. So, so I thought, I thought you were going to say protection for like, because It's a dangerous person in the neighborhood. And the, the the sleeping with them as an act of payment to keep them in your good graces. But what you're saying is it's no, if you have children and they think it might be theirs, that's protection.
Yeah. It only works in a small, like insular community. So that wouldn't be a common reason for women cheating today. So the common reasons for women cheating today, I guess, in a modern developed Urban society would probably be [00:26:00] information gathering or hypergamy.
Well,
Simone Collins: so
this is interesting. So you're going to have these pre evolved reasons to cheat.
And then the question is this, which are most active in modern communities? Yes. Right. But, but, but also what's really interesting is, is, and I think that this is not something that is. Like in the psychologist community, it's sort of a fight between these models. And I'm like, well, you know, you can have multiple evolutionary strategies operating simultaneously.
If people aren't familiar with our two, two of my favorite sexual strategies that we came up with after writing the pragmatist guide to sexuality, are both dual strategies. And they came from us understanding that humans exist in a variety of Circumstances. It might have polymorphic behavioral patterns.
That means the same genes can encode for two different phenotypes or two different behavior patterns. So in human females, we, we argue that it's likely a polymorphic thing. The more partners that they sleep with, like if a woman in a historic context had like 10 partners, It almost always [00:27:00] meant she was a sex slave.
She had been captured, her village had been raided, and she was being used by the population. And if she was not that, you know, because most of the successful widespread cultures, well, a huge chunk of the like small random cultures, you'll get like 89 percent are polygynous. Most tend towards monogamous when you're talking about the big successful cultures in history.
That, that most humans lived under. So, You know, but, but even the big successful cultures were allowed to keep sex slaves. You know, Muslims were allowed to keep a form of sex slaves. Jews were allowed to keep a form of sex slave. I don't know if early Christians were, but like even, even the Abrahamic tree, you know, like it's, it's, it's, it's common in history, buddy.
And so, it would have been Advantageous to women in that environment to have a mechanism for knowing they're in that environment and to then become turned on by the type of sex they would have in that environment to not be killed by their partner who likely doesn't value their life very much.
So that they get some chance at passing on their genes. And then in the [00:28:00] other scenario for the monogamous scenario. Women are much better off just forming an intense, dedicated attraction to an individual. And you actually see this in the data women who have not slept around very much tend to form an instinctual, really strong relation with one of the first people they sleep with often with the first person they sleep with.
Basically instantly fall in love with that person. They get a strong dose of oxytocin from the sexual encounters. I've seen this with girls I've dated in the past. Like, if they were virgins, and I really slept with virgins dispositionally, like probably 25 percent of the people I slept with were virgins because I preferred virgins.
I know that's horrible, but I think most guys sort of instinctually do. And it affected the way I perceived them in the same way that when somebody has slept with a lot of people that affects the way I see them from an arousal standpoint and a biological reason, that would be the case. It's not like I'm just a jerk here.
So anyway the Virgin it's very common. They like instantly fall in love and form this really strong attachment.
. Yeah, that was that, that, that makes sense. So there, you basically have a two female sexual patterns. One is [00:29:00] I formed an immediate attachment to the first person I sleep with monogamous optimized.
The other is if I'm being passed around a lot, I turn violentosexual which you can read in our stuff. Women. Liking sexual violence is actually really common in American. If you, if you look at like porn searches there was a book, a million little thoughts or something like that. The show that the violent porn searches are actually more common among women than men.
And there and we found really high rates of violence preference from women in our study as well. And I actually asked Aella, like, could she look by partner numbers? She hasn't published this, but she's looked at her own number. She said, yeah, it checks out. partner number women with really high body counts prefer sexual violence.
And often, you know, choking other forms of like extreme dominance consensual non consent, stuff like that. And they seem to have a preference for this polyamorous lifestyle which is sort of modeling what it would have been like. To be honest, I'd be a sex slave. So anyway can women recover from this?
I don't know. They might be able to and rebuild this old mindset, but like there wouldn't be a [00:30:00] strong evolutionary reason to recover from it because sex slaves very rarely turned monogamous, historically speaking. Then men have a dual strategy as well. And the male dual strategy is I argue that men would have had two core environments where they would have been impregnating people.
Okay. One is. sex slaves when you are raiding a settlement, when you are, you know, going out there, pillaging a village, doing war, you want to have a biological instinct to impregnate as many of these people whose partners you've just killed, you know, and we see this in modern religious texts from the period.
It basically says, yeah, they're fair game. They're, they're daughters, they're wives, you do these rituals, but after that they're fair game. And so we know, we know this happened historically speaking. So I need to have a sexual optimization function designed for that. And then I need a separate sexual optimization function designed for a monogamous wife who is going to be much lower quality.
If she thinks I'm going to treat her that way, right? And so it means that I suspect that men actually get turned on by [00:31:00] two different sets of things, depending on the context they're in. Do they think this person is a long term partner of theirs? And your body can tell if it's a long term partner. Then you're going to be aroused by doing specific things with them.
And do you think this person isn't a long term partner? Then you're going to be doing other things. And that's why I suspect the disposability in sort of male Porn consumption, right? Because, you know, you're looking at this disposable asset. Very violent often compared to other stuff.
And that's because the men are perceiving these as a disposable sexual partner, not as a long term sexual partner. And it causes young men to misgage their own sexuality. They think that they're this violentosexual type, this extreme dominance type when it's really, no, you're just that because you are.
You, you haven't had a long term partner yet and you don't know what your real sexuality is yet because you haven't had a chance to try it. You are judging your sexuality based on the porn you're consuming which is not an accurate representation of your sexuality. So those theories are uniquely ours.
I'd love to see them get out there in the world of sexual research. But the point being is they assume multiple types of sexual strategies overlapping. So I want to get to a study that was done recently, but I want to hear any thoughts you have before I do. [00:32:00]
Simone Collins: Well, I'm curious what you think the modern.
listener to this podcast should be taken away from it in terms of like, if he doesn't want to be cheated on, what should he be doing? Aside from being trying to become a dominant, high class billionaire?
Well, actually, cheating is a really replicated behavior, which we'll get to when we get to the stats after this.
So the number one thing to do is not marry a cheater.
Simone Collins: Okay, so once a cheater, always a cheater. If someone cheated, if they even cheated on you. They're gonna cheat. Not a hundred
percent. We'll get into the statistics in a second. Okay. But yeah you, you have a higher probability. And it, it appears that it's, it's not just like that cheating is trained into them.
It appears that there might be like a cheating genotype IE that there might be some polygenic score essentially for a preference for cheating. Which makes sense. That, you know, you would have different sexual strategies within different populations and cultures that are rewarded in different ways.
Hmm. Like, anyway. [00:33:00] I'll continue here. So, so he found, he was doing a study because he's trying to figure out, okay, is it mate switching? Is it better genes? Is that more like it? And he found that men rated their partners who they're currently with as better parents than the people they cheated with and that they rated the people they were cheating with as more attractive.
And that women did the same thing. Women rated their partners who they were whiz as better parents and the people they were cheating whiz as more attractive. Okay, and so he took this to mean, he's like, oh, this means better genes hypothesis is probably right. And I'm like, what? No, it doesn't. Okay. First of all, what you should have been asking is, are they a better source of resources?
Because that's really what the, the, the beta bucks alpha F's hypothesis is about. It's not, are they better parents? Of course, people are going to have an instinctual biological bond with their biological child and better parent them. We [00:34:00] know this from the research, biological parents try harder than non biological parents.
So of course, The biological father of your child is going to treat that child better than the guy you're effing on the side, like anyone who's broadly sane would know this. And then he was like, oh, and it's, it's really interesting here that, you know, Men found the people that they were sleeping with outside the relationship better.
Like why would they do that? It's like, because novelty is really important to male sexuality. Obviously you get a huge genetic reward. If you can sleep with someone and get somebody else to raise your kids. But now let's go over some stats. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So one funny study found that 20 percent of men and 13 percent of married women admitted to having sex with somebody outside of their marriage averaging to 16 percent overall. Men.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, everyone thinks it's just men who cheat though. And that's what blows my mind is it blows my mind that women cheat at all. But here's the
thing, a 2021 survey. [00:35:00] So I, the problem with the cheating data I get is it's all over the place. So 2021 study by health testing centers pulled 441 people.
And it found that a little over 46 percent of respondents in monogamous relationships said they had had affairs. Oh, that's because this is looking at monogamous relationships and not marriages. So 46, around half of people have cheated. Nearly 24 percent of marriages affected by infidelity report staying together.
47. 5 percent of relationships affected by cheating said that they established and enforced new relationship rules, such as sharing phone passwords to minimize the likelihood of more affairs. That's actually important. Like what's, what's the consequences of cheating? The relationship rules need to be restructured in favor of the person who has cheated against often.
Recent studies estimate that approximately 1 to 3 percent of men are unknowingly raising a child that is not biologically theirs. A 2022 study published by Human Reproduction found that 11 percent of men seeking paternity testing services were not the biological fathers of the children. For general estimates, these range between 0.
6 and [00:36:00] 0. 9 percent of men. So I'll make a note here. There's this myth that. around 30 percent of people are raising kids that are on their own. That actually came from men that were already highly suspicious. It's actually probably under 1 percent or maybe between one to 3%,
Simone Collins: depending
but this is in the developed world where you have contraception.
If you look outside of environments for contraceptive in common you get to rates around 20 percent to 30 percent actually if you look at cheating in these environments, it's often higher. So in a subsequent or in Africa, you get the 20 percent to 30% extramarital sex rate and for women, it's a five to 15%.
So, this is other interesting statistics here. Recent studies suggested that the prevalence of infidelity is underreported due to the way individuals are questioned about behaviors. Direct questioning revealed that 9 percent of women and 17 percent of men acknowledged to being unfaithful.
However, participants were provided with a checklist to identify specific sexual behaviors outside the relationship and the [00:37:00] numbers changed dramatically. The results gathered from the checklist. found that 15 percent of women and 27 percent of men engage in extramarital sex. Oh, so
Simone Collins: they're like, I mean, giving head doesn't count as cheating.
Obviously.
Yeah, well, the study was from 2018. It's called who cheats more the demographics and infidelity in America. this, this is, this is interesting. Surprisingly 56 percent of cheating men and 34 percent of cheating women consider their marriage is happy. So I think that this is another thing where a lot of people are like, well, I'm in a happy marriage, therefore my partner won't cheat.
And unfortunately that's just not what the data says.
Here is another study that looked at this a meta analysis of 12 infidelity studies among married couples found that 31 percent of men and 16 percent of women had. a sexual affair that entailed no emotional investment. 13 percent of men and 21 percent of women had been romantically involved, but not sexually involved with someone other than their spouse.
And 20 percent of men and women had engaged in an affair that included both asexual [00:38:00] and emotional connection. So that's really interesting. Men and women actually cheat the exact same amount when you average sexual and emotional cheating. It's just that women, when you
Simone Collins: count
both, Yeah. So it's 20 percent of men and women engaged in an affair that included both.
So they do it the same when it's both. But if you're looking at emotional cheating, women do it more. And if you look at sexual cheating, men do it more.
Simone Collins: Do you think men care about emotional cheating now?
Well, I mean, in studies, they just don't, not as much. They care. The
Simone Collins: thing is, I think men do physical, you know, like having sex with other people physically, where there's no emotional component.
I think would probably bother the average female partner less than an emotional affair. And I think that for men, Oh, an emotional affair that a woman has would probably bother him less than a physically sexual affair that she has. So it's probably nice that
this is well studied in the data. What you said, a lot of studies have been done on this and that's consistently [00:39:00] found across cultures.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
So you
Simone Collins: would definitely freak out a lot more if you had like a really strong emotional connection with another woman.
And I would. Freak out a lot more if I knew you were having sex with another man.
Simone Collins: Really? That's yeah. So there
you go. You know, I don't even know if I care that much. If I felt you had an emotional connection, how would you feel if I
Simone Collins: podcasted with another man?
I would be devastated if you podcasted with another
woman. Well we have, we have an episode with Ayla where it's just me and her that hasn't gone live yet.
Simone Collins: No, wait, that's gone live.
No, no. Then we recorded two episodes that day. So one of them hasn't gone live yet.
Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Well, I was. door knocking and the cold pregnant.
You
are so hardworking Simone. You are, this is why I can't leave you. Anyway so, so here's an interesting thing. So men are most likely to cheat between. Like when they're young, like back when I used to do it, right? So like when their testosterone
Simone Collins: levels are higher and then when they become more pair bonded and
yeah,
Simone Collins: wait, as, as men age, their, their testosterone levels probably go.
Yeah. They go down, they
go down when they're in a monogamous relationship and they go down when they have kids. So basically [00:40:00] evolutionarily successful men have low testosterone. I got my levels tested recently because I, Assumed they were low and apparently they're not low. Yeah, they're high, but now I know why they're not low because I did a, a 23 on me scan, not a 23 me.
It was a . No, this, this was
Simone Collins: your nebulous scan where you got the ? Yeah, it showed that I was in the
99th percentile in terms of testosterone rate. Yeah. The predictedness due to my genes and like that makes sense. We've done other episodes where I sort of talk about like a lot of people don't know what high testosterone looks like.
And I have a face that looks like a picture of a diagram of what somebody who developed in a high testosterone. I don't
Simone Collins: know where this, this trope of soy doesn't seem to. Correlate with actual
no, it doesn't because Andrew Tate is his face is the picture of a low testosterone. I
Simone Collins: think I think the whole soy boy thing more correlates with like how much time you spend in a gym and how developed your.
Various gym related muscles look and I, I mean it when I [00:41:00] say gym related muscles, it really aren't going to show up unless you actually spend time preening like a woman.
Well, yeah, it's about socially signaling to other men. We've talked about this. I mean, it is, it is preening in a feat and that's why women, I mean, there's all the memes from the gym bros that like they imagine that they're going to get fit and it's going to be women fawning over them, but it's just men fawning
Simone Collins: over them.
Women don't care. It's so like, there's. I've, I've read a decent number of romance novels and listened to a decent, you know, I, I've been exposed to this content less than 1 percent of this stuff has to do with any sort of description of musculature. Absolutely. Status dominance in terms of bearing matter being
Dominates in terms of bearing as well as is confidence and presence.
Simone Collins: Yeah confidence and presence
easily. You can't be Insecure you can't be
Simone Collins: muscles. I don't really [00:42:00] hear described that much. It's just interesting. Well,
this is one of the reasons people are like, why do you mention like that you've slept with lots of people and stuff like that? And it's because it's important in qualifying a big mistake in our society that in terms of securing a partner leads a lot of men to make a big mistakes in terms of time investment calculation.
And that they are investing a lot of time in honing their body more than they need to for health reasons are actually finding a partner. If you are doing enough exercise to be at optimum health, okay, you are going to be at optimum for finding most partners except for ones with fairly rare fetishes.
And that's, that's Unfortunately, just the way it is. And it leads to miscalculations where we're actually, it's more about like presence and ambition for the future because, you know, they're thinking about who am I going to spend my life with, right? Like that's, that's what they care about. We've talked about that enough in another episode.
Actually was talking a lot with Simone about this afterwards. And what we came to was.
It appears that men. R.
Confusing. [00:43:00] Intersexual signaling competitions. With interest, sexual signaling. So to word this a different way. , the ways that men are signaling in terms of bodybuilding is specifically signaling to other men. And not to women. It's like, Okay. If you think about like the classic, a girl crushes. , from various generations. Girls were able to go and watch the Marvel movie right.
Filled with all sorts of buff. , Masculine characters, who is the predominant girl crush coming out of that movie? It was low-key like, everyone knows it was low-key right. Or you go to like the tumbler sexy boy era. You know, who were they? , thirsting after it was, it was characters like.
The one slur. Freaking insane. Right. You know? , or Allister from has been hotel. , and then the gym bros, who do they look [00:44:00] like from popular media? Right? They look like, Hey man. But he man. I wasn't made for girls. He man was made for boys. He man was an aspirational look for inter sexual hierarchy battles among men.
Or who else from popular media? Conan the barbarian. They look like Conan the barbarian, but again, Conan the barbarian is mint to sell to men.
And then another huge mistake that people will be. There'll be like, well, I can look at this. Study, right. Like I can, I can go. And I can line up men by muscle and then ask women. To choose. Which of these men, are you going to prefer? And they'll choose them where muscular men. And it's like, yeah. That may be true. But that's not how women actually choose a relate to mates.
You're putting up a visual test. Instead of a test of vibe, which is how women actually relate to things. Remember it's [00:45:00] vibe, presence, confidence. So don't again, you know, the, the, the male influencers who have a vested interest in telling you, oh, you, you have to strive for this aspirational body type that I have, and you do not have considered Cris Williamson. I love the guy, right. , he has this body type that would be this aspirational body type, but. He doesn't have a wife.
Okay. He doesn't have kids. He's a genetic failure. And I'm pretty sure he's older than me too. . If you look at what the men look like in the actual.
Books that women are reading to get off in these actual female romance books, as Simone says, They're just often not these He-Man looking characters. If you look at the fan art that the teenage girls are drawing of their crushes, they don't look like this. Okay. , they are, , generally lean and skinny.
And I actually think that the, the best representation [00:46:00] of men misunderstanding they'll call here all of it. So they'll hear women want confidence, and then they will go online and market guy for acting quote, unquote, faggy, and saying that he's not going to get a girl. There is perhaps. Few better pictures of male confidence than the flamboyant gay man.
And as somebody with a lots of female friends, women find flamboyant gay men, hot. You are misunderstanding what women want. And it's part of why so many men today struggle to. In any way. Capture female attention.
I want to keep going on stuff we haven't talked about, which is women actually cheat the most when they're over 65. Older
Simone Collins: women are
this trope.
Simone Collins: There's, I don't know if you've seen this, but there is this trope in media of. Old person homes where there's obviously fewer men because men on average die much earlier [00:47:00] and women are just thirsty.
And there's this trope of the. Man who is just drowning in pussy in the old person home. Well, there's absolutely an evolutionary reason for this.
What? Why? Okay. So let's talk about it. If you were post menopausal.
Simone Collins: Okay. I
wouldn't really care if you were sexually intimate with other men.
On reflection. My opinion of this may change as I get older, because I realized that when I was thinking of a post-menopausal Simone, I was thinking of an old looking lady. And I was like, well, I don't find old looking women attractive. So I guess we just won't be sexually active at that point in our lives.
, and now I'm like, well, but I'll be older than two.
And I don't know, I would have found Simone attractive at this age when I was younger as well. Um, It, like, So, you think the issue is that these women feel like their partners are comfortable with it, and that's why they're going for it?
It's not that their partners are, It is that the, the possessiveness I would have of you as a sexual partner would just [00:48:00] naturally decrease when you're no longer fertile. Why would that
Simone Collins: influence my interest in cheating?
Hold, hold, hold, hold. We gotta get to this, okay? Okay. So, first we gotta think about this from an evolutionary perspective, right?
Postmenopausal women Sleeping around has almost no genetic risk to the male. There just isn't a genetic risk. Yeah. Yeah. You're not talking
Simone Collins: about the women though.
Hold on. Listen, listen, we have to keep going with the men because it matters to the women.
Simone Collins: Okay.
However, are the benefits still there? Could you secure additional resources from other men by sleeping with them after you have born all my kids?
And I know that you are raising and passing those resources down to the kids. Yes, you, there are benefits. to you and my kids from you sleeping around postmenopausally speaking. Because you can, at the nursing home, build connections with other people, get resources from other people, and there's no longer any real risk.
One of the things to note [00:49:00] here, right, What is this? What do you think is so funny about this? I'm just
Simone Collins: picturing, like, you and me sitting on rocking chairs overlooking a field, and you're like, Simone, why don't you go out to That old person home mess around, see
if you were getting a benefit from it. Oh my God.
Like, I knew you were sleeping with some billionaire and you were postmenopausal. And I got, you know, like, like the person ended up investing in one of our kids, like 10 million in one of our kids companies.
Simone Collins: No, I'm sorry. I just,
I'm just saying they can
Simone Collins: find 10 million
elsewhere. You also don't know how instinctually you're going to change when you become postmenopausal.
The rate of women cheating postmenopausally goes up astronomically. It's like four X or something what it is at other times of their life. Yeah. But
Simone Collins: you know, as we've seen in our sexuality research, people's sexuality. Tends to stay pretty stable. And I am pretty sure that means I'm [00:50:00] going to remain asexual, but gay for Malcolm.
It's not like I'm going to reach some. Yeah, maybe. And I
should say, I wouldn't be like super awesome chilled with it, but I would weigh the benefits of you opposing an apostle. Let's, let's just, I didn't move on from the
Simone Collins: conversation of whoring out.
And they're like, I would give you a 50 million to sleep with your wife.
Like, I wouldn't even think about it. . I wouldn't even think about it. I, wonderful, wonderful. No, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's but if you're postmenopausal, I'd be like, well, hold on. That $50 million could matter a lot to my kids.
Simone Collins: Uhhuh, .
In terms of their quality of life, their ability to have kids I mean, how many surrogates could I get with that for additional women?
Now that your body's no longer useful to me? Oh my God. It's useful in a new way. We gotta keep three for Tuesday here, Simone.
Simone Collins: You know, keep your eye on the prize, Malcolm.
Okay. I love about you. Here's, here's another one that I think you'd find really funny. So in a gleaming survey covering [00:51:00] 8, 000 respondents, 57 percent of women in 62 percent of men admitted to having an affair while they were away on a business trip.
Which is really interesting because that's way higher than any of the normal numbers, but it's for people specifically who go on business trips.
Simone Collins: Okay. So when dating people, if you are really not into being cheated on, ask them how frequently they travel for business, because that's a red flag. Right there.
That's really useful. That's, I want, I want actionable, actionable advice for our listeners today. So I want to hear another
crazy study. According to a study in computers in human behavior, 18 percent to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship while using the app. But Americans only.
This number skyrocketed to 42 percent around half of tinder users for using it to have an affair which is actually a really important thing that we used to be able to avoid using something called Facebook official. So it used to be historically when I was dating, the norm was when a relationship got serious, like [00:52:00] a huge escalation in the relationship status that was like, I wouldn't say halfway to getting engaged, but it was like a, now this is an official.
Yeah. Yeah. I
Simone Collins: remember. Yeah. Facebook relationship status was a big signaler. Although I want to pretend that you're single. I want to go further back to my little, you know, 1950s, 1960s coronet films, like those little instructional videos that were played in high schools for students, giving them social norms.
I was really stunned when one on dating really made it clear that at least dating in high school. Was you were dating multiple people and monogamy within dating, if you weren't going to get engaged or married, it was kind of expected that you as a woman would see multiple guys and that a guy would see multiple women.
Now, I think the important thing is that people were not having sex. Maybe they were making out, right? But they were not having sex because that was just not done. At least not for me. Were you dating her high
school? No,
Simone Collins: no, no, no, no. I'm saying in, in the forties through [00:53:00] sixties. Oh. Probably forties through fifties.
Slutting in the sixties. But they, it was understood that when you were dating, 'cause you're trying to find a partner, you should be dating multiple people. You should be playing the field. So to me, to a certain extent, I think about people dating on Tinder, dating, Facebook, dating a lot of people at the same time, concurrently, I think this concept, ,
hold on, hold on.
They had a Facebook official in the 50s and 40s. Do you remember what it was? Going steady. No, it wasn't just going study. It was a way to signal, honestly. So Facebook official . Oh, the class
Simone Collins: ring. The promise ring.
It was the promise ring. The Letterman jacket.
Simone Collins: Oh, that too. The
girl, your Letterman jacket.
And she would wear it around. Yeah. So everyone knew that was your girl and knew you were taken. Yeah. So you couldn't proceed. Well, yeah. And
Simone Collins: going study too was a sign that you were more, more committed, did they Also, but I think
ceremony that they would do.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but that was for when people were basically pre engaged and the plan was that they were going to get [00:54:00] married and people were dating to get married.
And I think the important thing is in an ecosystem in which people are dating to get married, you are dating multiple people concurrently and this concept that people when dating, like when, when finding someone on tinder and casually going on dates or then get horrified when it turns out that they're the person that they're dating is dating other people.
Well, why should you be horrified? It actually makes a lot more sense to be dating multiple people at once instead of serial monogamy. If the goal is to find a good partner for your life. So I say we go back to it.
Well, so here's, here's a, another fun stat you'll probably just, To be offensive, some studies have found higher rates of infidelity among black adults, 24 percent compared to white adults, 16%.
So it's an offensive stat, but now I want to get to your question about how likely is somebody to cheat if they had cheated before? So yes, I means well, I'll just say like extra sexual relationship. Findings from logical regressions showed that those who reported engaging in [00:55:00] extrasexual relationships in the first relationship were three times more likely to report in engaging in an extrasexual relationship in their next relationship compared to those who do not report engaging in extrasexual.
I'm just
Simone Collins: picturing heckle fish saying once a cheetah, always a cheetah. Oh
gosh. This is from Y files. A great show. If you guys haven't seen it. Yeah. Deserves his big audience. Similarly, compared to those who reported that their first relationship partners did not engage in ESA, though, in extra sexual relationship, those who knew that their partners in the first relationship had engaged in an extra sexual relationship were twice as likely to report the same behavior from their next partners.
Those who, Oh my
Simone Collins: gosh.
So this is also like
Simone Collins: people being abused. You know, like they just keep ending up in, in relationships in which they're abused and people being cheated on, keep ending up in a relationships in which they're being cheated on.
Yeah, well, well, here's another thing. Well, no, this is also like, if you know that your partner has done this, the other thing is suspicion.
So those who were suspicious that their first partners did yes, I and perform [00:56:00] relationships had four times the rate of that suspicion in their current relationship. So it appears you might also have like a genetic proclivity towards suspicion.
Simone Collins: Fascinating.
Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's the studies that we have to go over here.
So what do you think? And we got down to those initial reasons why women cheat. I just think it's all of them. I think all of them played some evolutionary role in humans. I think the one thing I'd add is I suspect that there's a separate one, which is postmenopausal women that likely their sexuality transformed.
forms in some way where sexuality becomes more transactional for them. Let's not think about old people voting each other. Let's just pretend it doesn't happen,
Simone Collins: okay?
Let's pretend it You know that this is where you have the highest rates of STDs? I know! I know! And
Simone Collins: I don't
want to know that! It's one of those things that you just wish you didn't know.
But here's the thing, I can't imagine ever finding an old woman attractive. Like, I can't even imagine finding you attractive when you're old. I don't know [00:57:00] How this works, like, am I going to
Simone Collins: find you attractive now? I think you and I also approach sexuality very differently from other people. I think for a lot of people, and we're, we have to get back to this too, that.
That's a lot of people think that they're talking about sex when really they're talking about validation. They're talking about their own personal narrative and how they feel about themselves. And maybe that's what's going on here. You know? Okay. Yeah. It's like gross old people bodies, but sex was never about actually, you know, beyond your adolescence, when like the hormones really are raging, it was never really about.
You know, all these things. It was always about trying to satisfy some kind of perception of I'm the kind of person who has sex. I need to go out and get sex. And, and maybe that when people reach an age where they're retired and they have all this leisure time, they still haven't gotten past this understanding that that success in life means that you're having a lot of sex and therefore they need to get it.
Yeah, yeah, even if it's gross, even if it's not, you know, they need a lot of [00:58:00] lubrication, whatever I just, let's, let's not think
about it. Well, hold on, I want to, I want to talk about another thing that I've always found really funny from an evolutionary standpoint is when lesbians get mad that guys don't care when their girlfriends or wives cheat on them with lesbians.
There isn't an evolutionary reason to be afraid of that. Anything. It's a potential benefit because that's an additional sexual partner.
Simone Collins: No, no, no, no, no. And that's because I think the emotional cheating element of it is major. No, but I'm talking men and
men
Simone Collins: just don't
care as much about it. Oh,
Simone Collins: like if I slept with a girl, you'd be like, okay.
Yeah.
A lot of lesbians get actively offended that guys don't care about this. They're like, they don't see the relationship. Yeah.
Simone Collins: I just, I really don't want it. I don't even, I feel like, If anything for most guys, it would be seen as like kind of hot,
you know, disease transfer to between women when they're having sexual encounters is incredibly rare.
Honestly, I
Simone Collins: feel like most women would probably improve their husband's sexual satisfaction of them. If they had an extramarital affair with a [00:59:00] female, even if that female had zero, like, you know, even if there's zero chance, it'd be a three way just because it's like, they're thinking about their wife having sex.
Probably. Yeah. And I, the calculation that would be going on in my brain is well, and what I have, like my wife actually falls for this person and is willing to then have another partner who I can impregnate in our marriage. Right. Like it makes perfect sense. rupturally not be as stable, but it's more kids and more hands in the house.
Yeah. So
Simone Collins: you're just, yeah. Yeah. I guess you're like, Oh, like, yeah. And I could see this being a normal male response of why not polygamy?
I think something will be like, Oh no, like monogamy stands all the way. But I think that, you know, most men, if they had enough wealth to the South Park thing again, They'd be like, yeah, it makes sense to, to press for that.
But yeah, so I, I, I find that interesting as well. This, this very confused reaction as to why women would care when their husbands sleep with other men, because this does [01:00:00] happen and women get quite upset, even when it's only sexual. It's because historically speaking, the disease transfer rate between male, male sex.
He's incredibly high compared to any other form of sex you can have. And it is really dangerous for a woman to have her husband be out there sleeping with other men, even though there's no risk of him, like impregnating them and diverting resources. Which is why, you know, fortunately I'm not at risk there.
No, no no temptation on that point. Fortunately. And I want to say, fortunately, I don't mean anything about gay people. It just means they'd be harder. When I was young, I remember before I went through puberty, I thought being bi would be easier because I was like, well, it
Simone Collins: seems like being gay would be ideal because like gay men, I was a lot easier to have sex.
I imagine, I imagine, you know, cause women are much more stingy.
Bi as a man would be ideal before I knew what my sexuality was. Like I was just like, well, nothing arouses me right now. So I wonder what
Simone Collins: I'm
going to get dealt. And the hand I was hoping for [01:01:00] was not straight. It was by here was my logic, sound logic at the time.
Actually, I said, I get a wider pool of sexual partners. I can basically date anyone I want to and a portion of that pool. I will have full knowledge of what they want so that, you know, and they will have full knowledge of what I want. So they'll likely be able to please me better, but I'd still be able to have a family and everything like that.
Right. Yeah. But now as an adult, I'm like, Oh, thank God I'm not by because that is a whole Area of temptation in my marriage that I don't have, I never need to worry about being tempted by like a guy on a business trip or something like that and risk getting the diseases that could be associated with that and risk any relationship complications that could be associated with that.
All four. I'm trying to think like, is
Simone Collins: the, you know, so we were talking earlier about husbands wouldn't be pissed if you, you know, would I be pissed if you had an emotional affair with a [01:02:00] guy or a sexual affair with a guy. I would be, I would be less concerned. Would you actually hear the question? I would be less concerned by a bromance, by an emotional affair with a guy than if you had a,
just, just biologically speaking, instinctually speaking, would you be more concerned if you heard I had slept with another guy or more concerned if you heard I slept with another woman?
Simone Collins: Like same, like that, that's not raising any hackles for me. I don't know why. Yeah.
It's interesting. Well, I mean, it's interesting with a lot of this stuff. You can just search your own feelings. I just think
Simone Collins: it's, I think, I think bi men are uniquely unusual. I, I just don't think there are that many.
I don't think there are that many either, and in the Pregnancy Guide to Sexuality, one of the biggest mysteries of human sexuality is, why is it that gay women, right, look more like straight women, but that have a female preference?
And why is it that gay men, instead of looking like a female [01:03:00] sexual expression, have a sexual expression that's more like a mirrored straight sexual expression, i. e. they look like straight men but that are interested in men. So I'm going to explain this a little differently here. When we did our studies, what we found is that straight men often find the idea of sex with men, it elicits an active disgust reaction.
As we say, disgust is part of the sexual profile of a human. We need to Talk about this. It's not just arousal. And for many gay men, sleeping with a woman actually elicits an active disgust response. But in often gay women, you don't get this as much. They, they don't have as much active disgust towards sleeping with men.
They're just disinterested in it. And with straight women, It's the same thing. So they're both like much closer to the center of, of, of this sort of Kinsey spectrum. And I think that this gives us some idea of what's going on when a person is born gay, that it is not that they are born with the opposite gender's sexual profile, but they are born with a mirrored iteration of their own gender sexual profile, [01:04:00] which says a lot about how sex might develop in humans.
And if you want to know more about this, the pragmatist guide to sexuality is the book. for you. I love you to decimon. Any final thoughts?
Simone Collins: Nah, she's peeing through her diaper on my arm right now. So I gotta, I gotta be in, you're being a
real trad wife here. Come on,
Simone Collins: you ain't trad unless you're being peed on.
That's like fancy
stuff and you're like, oh, it's pooping again. It's
Simone Collins: peeing again.
You are delightful. Simone. I am so glad to be married to you and I'm so glad I genuinely. Never worry that you're cheating. Like I, I have no, there is no like doubt in the back of my mind that's like, Oh, she might be thinking about leaving me or she might be like, well, I'm so
Simone Collins: autistic that if I did cheat on you, it would be in my calendar is like cheat on.
Hey, Simone, can we talk about this?
I see. Well, and I mean, with me, I doubt you have any real fear that I [01:05:00] would leave you because I was cheating on someone. Well, it's funny,
Simone Collins: like, I joked about being like, well, you know, if you had an emotional, like, if you podcasted with someone else, I'd be devastated. But, like, I mean, I actually, I don't, I'm not devastated that you podcasted with Ayla.
I love Ayla so freaking much, where I'm like, Of course you've talked with Ayla. I guess, I guess I see her as a sister though, you know, like she's a member of the family. She's part of House Collins as far as we're concerned. So I also, that's interesting is I wonder if people feel the same way about emotional relationships with people who they see as family.
This is the final point I want to make that I'd call harem sexuality. I've noticed some women seem to have a sexuality that's really optimized for being in a harem where they want, because many women historically were in harems, especially some of the most successful because those were all. So is it, no, no, no, no.
Then sister wife sexuality. Well, it's a little different because they're often really interested. Six year wives, my understanding in Mormon cultures, the [01:06:00] women didn't have sexual relations with each other. Whereas in harems they did. Yeah, often they did. And I've, and I've, I've met many women that really want to sort of manage a harem for their partner.
Like they like the idea of being dominant to other women, but being submissive to anyone. Oh, that's my nightmare.
Simone Collins: Like it, the idea, like when I think about. Polygamy. I don't think like Oh, how could I share Malcolm? I, I just think like, I don't want to be around more people.
Here's another instinctual thing that I've noticed in you where it comes with, you know, if I was risk of sleeping with somebody other than you is you seem to have much less instinctual concern.
Like ALO was somebody you mentioned. Now. Ayla's not somebody who I personally find attractive because I find really high body counts, like, instinctually unattractive. But you, like, wouldn't be as worried with someone like her, because I've noticed that you categorize specific women. If you're like, this woman [01:07:00] is high status, and I get along with her, and high resourced in some way you seem to not, like, when I say sleeping with a random person, you don't.
Put them in that same category. Yeah, but aren't
Simone Collins: they my biggest because in terms of like, if we were, if we were talking about risks to relationship integrity in the form of hypergamy, what you're saying is basically any woman who's better than me, I'm, I don't seem to be worried about.
No. Who's who, who is, is, is, is, well, she's more famous than
Simone Collins: me.
She's smarter than me. And she's much more pretty than me.
I, well, I don't think so, but I can understand how you're framing this. So I think she's,
Simone Collins: I think it's, I think our audience can agree too.
I don't think she's prettier than you. It's
Simone Collins: well, cause you're wearing husband goggles and God bless you for that.
You
respect. In some degree you don't seem to have the same risk feeling to, and this might be like when you're like, Oh, this person's like [01:08:00] basically family, what you're basically saying there is, I respect
Simone Collins: that person.
And I suspect that historically this might be an instinctual thing around how women chose harem partners historically.
Is that a respect? Yeah. Which is that women in harems would likely care if their husband went out and slept with a random person. But they'd care less if the person rose the status of their family.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, and I guess a lot of it also comes down to like personal identity and how you identify yourself.
And there are lots of even like non harem versions where women have chosen. For example, there was that one Mormon wife who Chose her husband's next wife. When she was born Ill, oh yeah, yeah.
Before when she died, she, she had a al illness, so sweet. And she said she gave him a list of people. She was okay.
Was in marrying because she believed, and Mormon women believe this, that if their husband's married two people in their life, even if they're not ous in life, they have to be ous in the next life. So when her husband dies, she had to spend eternity with whoever he chose to marry next.
Simone Collins: Oof. That's terrifying.
To, to not, to not pre choose, [01:09:00] it's weird that it's not more common what she did, but you know, you'd think that even if you weren't terminally ill, like what if you get killed in a car accident that you just like, if you're going to marry
someone. I think to make a vetting video for future wise for me, like, you know, look, he actually is that good.
Like it's not just an act for the camera. And here are some details that I expect from you. Are you going to do that? You got to, you got to take some time to film. Yeah. Well,
Simone Collins: I have that. Yeah. I have like a whole set of instructions for you if I die. So I should probably add in something for your future partner.
Anyway,
love you to decimals, wonderful wife and have a good day.
Simone Collins: You too.
Oh, wait, one note, note I want to make for people here when we're talking about this, it's important to understand like when we're hypothesizing harems or additional wives or who we're sleeping with, we're not talking about what we think.
Functionally works best in a relationship. We're talking about biological impulses to try to ferret out. Oh yeah. No, this, this
Simone Collins: [01:10:00] whole, this, this wasn't a relationship strategy. This was a, how do people experience personal emotional reactions to stuff? Discussion. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I just need to clarify that for anyone who's confused.
All right.
Simone Collins: Desimone. Ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao, ciao. I just, I realized the other day while I was falling asleep that The way that I view life is kind of like how a ghost would view life, where I have unfinished business on earth, but then once I'm done, I finally get to be released. And that's kind of how people view ghosts, like sort of in Western media,
The Evolving Science of Why Women Cheat