In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone explore the complex relationship between human predilections, such as arousal patterns and food preferences, and the cultural norms that shape our attitudes towards them. They question why it's socially acceptable to shame certain food choices but not sexual orientations, and delve into the historical context of how sexual compatibility became a key factor in modern relationships. The couple also examines the formation of subcultures around shared experiences of societal othering, and how these communities can become intrinsically tied to one's identity. Throughout the conversation, they touch on topics such as the AIDS epidemic, the conglomeration of the LGBTQ+ movement, and the potential risks and benefits of gender transition. Join Malcolm and Simone as they navigate these sensitive issues and share their personal perspectives on fostering a supportive environment for their children.
[00:00:00] I don't know where are you're gonna go, so let's dive right in. It's something I've been thinking about recently.
, there are many things that humans have predilections for, whether those predilections are genetic or due to our environment growing up. Two broad categories where I think humans have a varying predilections that are both genetic and environmental are the things that arouse them and the flavors that they enjoy.
That's true. Yeah. Okay. Huh. So the question then becomes why is it that I cannot impugn someone if I'm like I don't like this particular food I don't think that cake is healthy, I don't think you should eat cake every day, I can understand that my kids might even like the taste of cake, okay?
But I am going to shame them for eating cake, I am going to withhold cake from them, Yeah, or soda or alcohol. People are very passionate about these things. Why is it that as a society, that's a totally normal thing to [00:01:00] say, but if I come from a cultural group that has similar beliefs around something like gender transition, that's same sex attraction that's seen as homophobic
Would you like to know more?
Our family doesn't particularly like Italian food. Like I find it to be carby and honestly a little bland for my taste.
We don't serve it a lot to our kids. Okay. Now some, a family that likes Italian food that like receives pleasure when they eat Italian food and really enjoys that.
I understand that there's other families like that. I just don't want that for my family. Right now, this is a totally normal and inoffensive thing to state. No one is going to say I'm a pasta phobe when I state something like this. Yeah. That's just not for you. What is really fascinating is when I correlate this with something like sexuality, you would get an extremely negative response.
because a lot of people they will attack our [00:02:00] position on gayness, which is to say that I, as a family, like in my kids were born, same sex attracted or due to environmental conditions become same sex attractive.
I'm not going to shame them because I think that we have other solutions to have families right now. And I think that, that the cost of shaming them are less than the benefits from a cultural perspective. But I hold. Nothing against the cultures that do. And I can understand why from a historic context, especially if they have other cultural solutions for same sex attraction.
The and a lot of people are like, all conservatives have the same solution to same sex attraction. And it's this is just objectively not true. So if I'm just contrasting three groups here traditional Catholics, traditional Muslims, and traditional Protestants traditional Catholics who are born same sex attracted.
If you look at the Catholic priesthood, some studies show that over 50 percent of the priesthood is same sex attracted. It is, they get a, position of status, but they just have to maintain celibacy. That's actually a pretty good trade off and not particularly inhumane. It's like ethically sourced eunuchs.
You go to, obviously it has led to some negative externalities for altar boys. Yeah. I was going to say, not [00:03:00] always eunuchs, but if you look at rates within the Catholic church versus other professions where people interact with kids a lot, like public school system, the rates of molestation. You guys know what I'm talking about, or higher in the public school system.
Even on a per teacher basis, a lot of people don't know this. And this was a report done by the Clinton administration. So get off me on this. Protestants, it is you just suppress it, but isn't that what I tell people with cake? Isn't that what I tell, just suppress what many cultures say with something like alcohol, or cake, or some foods that we might think are culturally distasteful, some cultural groups like Oh don't eat frog. Yeah. No, Jews, for example, or Muslims, for example, don't eat pig, right? It's not for any specific health reason. It's just don't eat pig. This is a control and you're like pig is good. I like eating pig, but that doesn't mean I have anything against Muslims.
So I'm starting by just laying out the problem, right? That's interesting. Yeah. So the question is, Why is this the case? And people are like people are really forced to live. Oh, and I forgot the Muslim [00:04:00] solution. The extremist Muslim solution is gender transition, which is actually really funny to me.
The gender transition progressives are like accidentally discovering conservative Islam, which is you have a gender confused young person who seems sex attractive and it's just transition them. No more gay. It's An interesting cultural solution. And we can get into briefly as to why I think you see this within Islamic populations and not in other populations, is it solves the sex ratio problem you have within Islamic populations because you have religion within Muslim populations.
Because some people have multiple female partners. Yeah. You have more unattached males in this culture. So there's more males who will just never get a partner. So it does make sense to transition. Greater societal stability. Yeah. People. Get married. Yeah. Because also one of the, one of the big things I would say is, if you can't, if you decide that, you live in a society that is anti carb and you fricking love carbs, like, all right, that's tough.
You'll adjust. But when you live in a society that doesn't let you, Choose the life partner that would that you'd be sexually compatible with and for some people that's really important part of their [00:05:00] relationship Why is that an important part of their relationship? Like it's an interesting thing to note, right?
Like historically this was not an important part of relation compatibility. Yeah, that is an interesting thing That's its own like huge Pandora's box right is why Do we care so much about sexual compatibility? There's an evolutionary argument to be made that at least when it comes to male female pairings, which are, reproductive in nature, it could matter because studies have shown that people, when they just smell sweaty shirts or something are more likely to be attracted to people with whom they would be genetically more compatible for whatever reason, right?
There's factor you can see these levels of, but I'm talking historically throughout most of history. Most people, yeah. Typically around people with whom they're fairly well genetically match. You're marrying people who you've never had sex with. Yeah. Who you've likely never even kissed, you've never held hands with, this is historically the norm.
Even if you're talking about many indigenous cultures which you had, I'm sorry, progressive. Elevate indigenous cultures. So I'm just [00:06:00] saying that even among the cultures that they elevate while you can find some that are outside of this actually historically No, you were not having sex outside of marriage that frequently except in rare anthropological cases and this is especially true of the successful cultures the cultures that ended up conquering their neighbors and forming long lived empires.
So the question here becomes this is weird, right? And I think that you came up with one of the answers. The elevation of sexual identity to something that was critical that a person lived out came downstream of sexuality becoming key to a healthy relationship. And sexual compatibility becoming key to a healthy relationship because in a historic context, it wasn't.
And I actually think relationships are worse off for it being elevated. Yeah. And when you look at subreddits, for example, like dead bedrooms, it's, yeah it when you make a relationship about sex and then the sex almost inevitably changes over time as people have kids and hormones change and things get [00:07:00] mismatched.
Yeah. Like you're setting yourself up for failure. Yeah I'm with my wife because I respect her as a human being. That was what I was looking for. Somebody can screw, I'm with you because you're freaking hot. But, whatever. But like i, IE your your effect on my arousal patterns is like the last thing that I'm thinking about in terms of what recommends you as a wife.
100%. Yeah. If we got divorced, it would never be over sex. It would never be over sex. And it's the same with our kids. When I'm elevating, when I'm telling my kids the type of person they should be looking for in a spouse, I would not elevate that. So I think this is one thing, is the perverse elevation of sexual compatibility within relationships.
Yeah, that's interesting. And just, honestly, sex within relationships. It's people approached diet from only the perception of dopamine spikes hold on, also It's really, you should probably approach diet from the perspective of, are you surviving, are you healthy and functional.
Yeah but the other thing that led to the elevation of this as an identity, so we're gonna talk about this, is the elevation of casual sex. [00:08:00] There was no real reason for gay men outside of like married gay men going to gay bathhouses occasionally, which historically was very normal. To when I say married, heterosexually married gay men just going to get relief occasionally outside of their marriage.
That as soon as you had casual dating was in these communities and it was expected that everyone in high school was sleeping around to some extent and everyone in college was sleeping around to some extent, which is a very new thing. Which is very new, then, yes, for these people to indulge in what was giving them arousal, they needed to go out and engage in a way that was public.
And people could say, admittedly right away, like, how dare you compare this to stuff Cake. And stuff like that. Being gay has no negative health consequences. And here I'd be like, REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE RECORD SCRATCH excuse me. Record scratch, that sounds more like an autistic re right there.
Oh, re, record scratch. Are you do you not remember the [00:09:00] AIDS epidemic? It nearly genocided the entire gay community. Because intrinsically you are going to get more STDs passed by anal sex than you are through other forms of sexual contact because it leads more blood to blood contact.
Duh, there is a reason why cultural groups culturally evolve, the iterations that shun this behavior had more surviving offspring than why you see a level of homophobia in almost every long lived widespread culture in the world today. Okay, now we have scientifically gotten to a point where we can get over that, but if you're talking about like when the gay movement was first blossoming, no, we had not yet gotten to a point where we could get around that, and the families of these people who told them that, It was better to live a closeted lifestyle than die of AIDS, which was the alternative for many of these people.
You're probably right. That's a horrible fucking thing to say, but it's also [00:10:00] objectively true if you're talking about the early gay movement and what happened to many of these people. Yeah. Really sad. And I appreciate what they went through to normalize their community.
But then you have the other thing, which is to say, whenever you take a community and you say you can't do this and we will shame you for doing this and the desire is strong enough to do that, that a portion of people are still going to indulge in that, then you will get a subculture that forms around that.
Then why isn't there a subculture for people who cheat on their partners? Because that is like historically men wouldn't have same sex liaisons. To a lesser extent and also men when you're cheating on your partner, but we'll get on that in a second I actually think that Portions of the modern poly movement evolved out of this subculture.
No interesting. I like that take that's what we can get on this in a second so we need to go back to If you had something like spicy food, everyone in society who eats spicy food is going to be punished. Okay? You would get a subculture of people who like spicy [00:11:00] food and they'd hang out in places and then they'd begin to use words like, oh, that's spicy to mean that's cool and stuff like that because their hierarchy was in their culture begins to become determined by how Much they are willing to other themselves in mainstream society to fit in with that culture in the same way that like two goths meet each other and they've never met each other before their relative hierarchy is normally determined by the number of like body modifications or outfits or knowledge they have of obscure bands that would other them in mainstream society or tattoos or whatever right so you begin to get pep like tattoos of chili peppers and like certain jewelry configurations that mean like when you meet someone oh you know this is another spicer spicer i like that they begin to talk among themselves and they begin to develop Alternate ways of speech and stuff like that, because they're talking within their own communities and they need to signal to other members of their community.
And then, oh, wouldn't you know it, there's this much rarer group of people but they really eating salt and they're also shunned by mainstream society for their salty taste. Now, this community is also an underground [00:12:00] community, and they just find it's more convenient because both groups are hated by society for things that they do with food to meet in the same locations and everything like that.
This is Largely what happened with the gay and trans movement. These movements have no real reason to be connected. But from sort of the economies of scale and resources perspective, it just made more sense to share some spaces. Yeah, in the early days. But they are as biological phenomenons, I think almost completely unrelated.
There, one's an arousal system thing. One's a gender system thing. Even if it is an arousal system thing, it's a much more specific arousal system thing. It's not the same kind of a thing, but they judged themselves by the people who hated them, because people always do that. When you are othered by society, you go where the Critical mass of cultural inertia is, and that's where you begin to identify, and that's how these various movements that really didn't have any reason to conglomerate began to conglomerate amongst each other into what is [00:13:00] now LGBTQ which is interesting and take that to mean whatever you mean, but what then ended up happening is people begin to define their identity By this subculture, and this always happens with subcultures.
I remember how personally hurt I was as a kid when I was dressed as a, like a seamster, basically, not true seamster, but like my own take on it. And somebody was like, Oh, I love that seamster look. I used to be a seamster too. I had a seamster phase a few years ago. And I felt so hurt by that. I was like, this isn't a phase.
This is my identity. How dare you? People always think that their community right now is their identity, right? You see this in the right as well, individuals who are like in their, Andrew Tate phase think that this whole man masculine thing is like their identity or this whole MGTOW thing is like the core of who they are or this whole red pill thing.
And it's no, trust me, bro. This is a phase. This is just the community that you are identifying with right now. And you have identified a sense of self around this community. community. [00:14:00] Now, certain communities can exist throughout your entire life if they become stable cultural units, which is what happened with the LGBT culture.
But that doesn't mean that it is intrinsically part of a person's humanity other than any more than like the foods that you like are an intrinsic part of your humanity. I think that's what we're looking at here is we, and then people can be like what is, your human identity really?
And I can say that of all the things that are not your identity, the things that I am extra sure are not your identity are the things that you didn't choose about yourself. The things that are just biologically coded into you. Like how much of a sweet tooth you have, your sexual orientation, et cetera.
Your gender. Your arousal pathways. Yeah. Your race, your like these things may cause society to treat you differently, but they're all things that you didn't choose about yourself. And therefore you have less ownership over them than the things that are a [00:15:00] result of who you differentially are. Oh, I like that.
Yeah. So the point you're trying to make is, That what we should use to define ourselves are the things that we are our prefrontal cortex courtesies essentially would say are ours that we own them. We didn't inherit them genetically deterministically. It was inevitable that we were going to hold these stances, but at least their stances that we intellectually own instead of stances that we.
Just genetically, hormonally inherited, right? That's cool. And I also think that you can see that, we talk about things like shaming, eating calories, right? Somebody's would a sub community, because we definitely do that, it would a sub community form around that has its own social norms and everything.
It's yes, that's what the Hades movement is. Where they pretend that eating too many calories isn't unhealthy. Oh, but then there's also the pro ana movement, which is, all about the opposite. But with the Hays movement, what's interesting is there are social norms within the Hays movement, where if somebody begins to lose weight, or if somebody begins to suggest that, being healthy may [00:16:00] this may be incompatible with being healthy, they get shunned and shamed by the community.
Oh, yeah. Which is just what you're going to see within things like the trans movement. And keep in mind, I think Trans is a real phenomenon, but I also think that a portion of it has gone off the rails right now. But if you are within the trans movement and you point that out, you will be completely excluded and ostracized from the community.
Which creates a really toxic environment within the community because people can use that identity to hide negative behavior patterns. Then I think the bigger question or takeaway I have from this is Yeah, okay. So yeah, it's There's no reason why, because we feel a certain orientation or attraction to things that we should necessarily indulge in them, but then the question is, what is ideal or justified in terms of denying yourself a craving versus not?
Because a lot of these things are cultural. Like you say, a lot of food prohibitions are based on very old religious traditions that originally may have [00:17:00] evolved to help with sanitation, food safety, but now don't really have a place in society. When how does a person individually thinking for themselves decide If they're going to act on certain sexual fetishes or arousal pathways or not?
I think that's a great question. And I want to point out here because one thing that I'm sure I'll get criticized for is people saying that the gay individuals are responsible for the AIDS epidemic that, that ended up hurting the community. No, that's not what I'm saying here. If you look at early things like early food prohibitions may have been around health reasons. Okay. If an individual eats those foods and gets a health issue, because they were eating those foods, I am not here saying it's their fault, like whatever, but it's it's an objectively true thing that these things are correlated.
And so then the first question is, are they still correlated? Are the reasons why we shame things like. gayness, right? Still correlated in our society. Does it still hurt people in the way it used to hurt people at the same rates? And the answer is no. [00:18:00] So within my cultural group, I will not shame my kids for doing it because everything you would potentially shame your kids for is an avenue other cultural groups can use to break your kids out of your cultural group.
Yeah. And it's a rebellion. Trigger it's a rebellion trigger So you are creating mechanisms for kids to leave your family with every one of these you stack up So there is a very strong motivation to remove these stacks Because when a kid and anything around sexuality is an incredibly powerful one to people to use Because the age at which kids Most deconvert from their birth culture, i.
e. their religion is between 15 and 21. That's also when they're going through puberty. That's also when they're experimenting with these things for the first time. This is the candy the man in the van can use to lure them to take them to the second location if you don't want them to go. So if you can destigmatize these within your cultures, you actually get a lot of additional cultural protection.
However, Transness, now this is a different thing. I [00:19:00] actually, when I look at the trans community, when I look at the data around the community, I think that it leads to more mental health problems. Whatever we have in terms of gender transition technology right now, and this may not always be the case, I think it's causing more problems than it's fixing.
And and I think that there was this great recent study done by a very respectable researcher which really showed this, that a lot of the narratives we've been getting around transition being the solution to gender dysphoria were just not long term data based. And This then leads me to say with my kids, would I warn them against that community?
Yeah, I would say that it is probably true that some portion of humans do have an incorrect sort of gender modifier in their brain, but they happen to be born with that. I do not think that gender transition is the cultural solution that we would recommend for them. Yeah. Which, for some people it sucks, right?
I don't know what to say. Like it's, somebody has a gambling addiction. It hurts them to say, yeah, you shouldn't be gambling. And [00:20:00] they might defy a lot as a gambler. They might really like doing it. They might have a biological compulsion to do it, but at the end of the day, it just seems to be correlated with long term negative outcomes.
So I wouldn't recommend that. And that would be the heuristic I'm using, whether it's food or arousal patterns or anything like that. And this is why we are generally very open to things like fetishes and stuff like that on this. This show where people can be like, why are you so open to these sexual things?
And it's because that provides our kids with a level of protection. Yeah. And generally with rules, what we've seen from the research is it really is best to have almost no rules and then just the. One or two rules that really matter you hold to them fast, and you never make exceptions, but yeah The moral rules have a religious community that can back all of your rules And this is the other thing about predilection shaming and stuff like that.
I will never impugn another culture for their practices. Okay, I'm not gonna say You don't get to practice these [00:21:00] practices. Those are not my kids. That is not my culture. And people will say what if it leads to those kids committing suicide? What if it leads to them being depressed? And I'm like okay, let's look at the data people.
It turns out that people who grow up outside of hard religious cultures or are very religious cultures have much higher rates of depression and suicide than people who grow up in very religious cultures. So does that mean we should like, does that mean we should get rid of those groups? No, of course not like It's absurd, right?
This, oh, what if kids end up committing suicide because of this actually ends up giving more power to the ultra religious communities and less power to the secular communities. When you look at the data like the overall sources of data outside of edge cases like gender transition and stuff like that.
But they selectively apply the data only where it allows their. community or group to impose their ideology on and their moral framework on other cultural systems, which I see as immoral. [00:22:00] Yeah, totally. Oh, I, any final thoughts? What about you? What about me? Like where I stand with all this?
Yeah. On our kids, et cetera. Yeah, in general with our kids, I just want them to be safe and I want them to ideally have kids that they give great experiences to. So the way I look at it is if there seems sex attracted, not a problem, just, make sure that you freeze your sperm or eggs, early.
And when you find the right partner, do IVF, whatever it might be, I think that's all fine and good. And the cool thing about us having a bigger family too, is let's say that we have a same sex attracted kid and they want to have kids that are closer to biologically them instead of getting a sperm donor or an egg donor.
Because let's say we've, two girls who turn out to be a girl who turns out to be a lesbian, she could just have her brother donate sperm and then have kids that are quite biologically Similar. So I don't know. I think that [00:23:00] there, there are fine solutions and we don't actually have a lot of logical reasons to be pretty specific about people's transitions.
I don't think collectively we're even against our kids transitioning, but though we would probably say, wait until you're of age, like you're an adult 18 to 21 before you actually do it. We're not going to support that before. Yeah. Ideally fully myelinated before you actually start transitioning.
I know that's tougher to hormonally to do that transition later, but still deal with it. And then before you transition, freeze your genetic materials, eggs or sperm ideally as embryos. Yes, but I would add that I do not think that the long term outcomes for these individuals are very good. If you look at the real data rather than the data that they're.
Yeah, but when you're looking at and I think it varies too. You really have to look at the actual community. If we have someone with rapid onset gender dysphoria It's a very different story from a kid that we have who from the very beginning. No, I agree. As parents, I think it's funny.
If you had parents who are actually supportive of this, they could actually tell you, which I've often seen with kids [00:24:00] is they'll go to their parent and they'll say, Mom, I've always acted like a girl. And the mom's I have raised a girl. You have not always acted like a girl. You have acted very differently from your sisters.
You have acted like your brothers your entire life. It's just, this community is good at getting people to recontextualize their entire life history through their own lens. And so if they knew that they had a family that wasn't going to be reflexively anti supportive, so I do agree with that, to give them honest information about whether what the community is telling them about their relationship.
Personal autobiographical history is actually accurate. Yeah. I view it, this sounds terrible, but I view transitioning similarly to how I view suicide. If someone for 20 years has wanted to end themselves. Yeah. You know what? Like they've been consistent about that. They've not flinched. They've been committed to it.
They've planned around it. They've held their stance. We've checked with them a billion times. Let them go for it. Same with transitioning, it's, these are like, typically if you're doing it all the way, which should, if you're going to do it permanent irreversible changes. So if you're committed and you're ready to go, [00:25:00] so I would just say I would take the same approach that we take to food, which is.
Generally, we're pretty permissive, trying to go against really strong, like need pathways often backfires as you see with diet culture, right? People who go on diets, inevitably slingshot back as soon as they lose control or stop being on Ozempic or whatever, right? They run out of their meal packets and I think the same goes for sexuality.
So in general, unless you feel like there is a very severe, Risk to a particular food or arousal pathway for example, if someone decided that they were super into eating humans, I'm sorry, we're going to draw a line there. And if someone, has specific, very illegal arousal pathways, and I'm not going to mention those words.
Nope. Sorry. That's just not going to happen. So Speaking of this is something you get with vegans as well. I don't say vegans are like anti meat eaters, right? I don't say they hate, and I understand why they might practice that as a family for, cultural reasons. And I support that.
It's just not my choice. Yeah. Yeah. Even, yeah. As long as it doesn't hurt a [00:26:00] baby, I don't know enough about the research around vegan infant formula, for example. I worry a little bit about that, but whatever. Yeah. As long as I love you too. If it doesn't work, they'll die out.
So whatever. No, nothing that can hurt babies. Never. I will find them and kill them. Like that dream I had last night where someone was threatening Indy who right now is dreaming very vividly in front of me in her crib. And then I, just beat this person up ruthlessly screaming at them.
People around me watched. I can't. Instinctually, I have dreams about hurting people who hurt babies. I cannot let that happen. But anyway, I don't, I'm sure vegan formula is probably, I love you Simone. I love you too, gorgeous.
Oops. Sorry. Okay. [00:27:00] We're recording. So you suggested as a topic, quality in food, which I find so intriguing. All I can think of immediately is this one scene from the Japanese film Tom Popo where there's this one couple that their entire, like all of their romantic liaisons is based on really weird food stuff.
This is gonna go in a totally different direction than you think, then. Yeah. I don't know where are you're gonna go, so let's dive right in.
Why Do We Treat Sexual Identity Differently from Flavor Preferences?