Techno-Puritanism / The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI

TPG 47.4.6 · 36,170 words · 2.7 hr read · Great Chatting Again

Cataloging Voting (part 6 of 7)

In these species, the males at the top of the social hierarchies are often quite generous and kind to their followers and those they believe can be convinced to follow them. In a high school context, the alpha isn’t the beefy meat head Chad Chadlington who bullies little Nigel Wilber; the Alpha is Mike Dexter, football captain and future astronaut, who protects the wimpy foreigner Nigel Wilber from Chad—with the implied agreement that after they kill Chad, Mike gets Chad’s girlfriend and all of Chad’s possessions, while Nigel gets to bone Sheena Simpson, the goth with bad hygiene who is secretly cheating on Nigel with Mike while she is ovulating (OK the analogy kind of breaks down, but you get the idea). Being alpha is not about being a beefy meat head; it’s about being cunning, kind, and generous. Being alpha involves building social coalitions while publicly neutralizing anyone who actively challenges your authority and privately neutralizing anyone who poses a threat.

The “Chad” archetype of a young, beefy meat head who generally mistreats others, surrounds himself with other men, and otherwise bucks the larger social structure of his society does have a corollary in nature. If a Chad were anything in the wild, he would be a dominant member of a roaming bachelor group. Roaming bachelor groups are not “mopping up women;” they are disaffected males searching for a place in the world—for a tribe to accept them (thus why they disproportionately lie about having sex). Chads should be looked upon with pity, not seen as sexual competition.

Early Human Warfare

Among groups in which a male gains authority by building a coalition, the evolutionary pressure from violent turnovers normally stems from strategies in which men gain access to additional females by conquering other tribes and killing off the male members of those tribes (as well as all their babies). This would explain why males who became aroused by violence against others and rape would have differently more surviving offspring than the females who were aroused by the same things. Sadly, this dynamic also explains why women who got turned on by the thought of being raped would have more surviving offspring when contrasted with men who bear the same arousal pattern.

We can even gain some insight into how one of these fights might have played out. One study showed that while men’s preferences for facial cues related to dominance in allies strengthen following losses (compared to wins) in violent contests, women’s preferences for facial cues related to dominance in allies weaken following losses (compared to wins) in violent contests. It is so neat that our instinctual preferences grant us an imprint of hundreds of thousands of slaughters favoring men who knew they were going to die if they didn’t double down in their support of the dominant male and privileging women who felt compelled to soften their support from the dominant males “on their side” as it appeared they might lose. While naturally not every fight went down this way, enough did that women who had one preference produced more surviving offspring while men who had another produced more surviving offspring, which ultimately produced the above gender split in behavior patterns when it looks like one’s own side is losing. In short, the conditions under which our species evolved rewarded men who doubled down in support of their team when losing a violent fight and rewarded women who began to consider switching sides when it looked like their team was losing.

Why do we think that raiders killed all the men of the tribes they conquered? First and foremost, this is a common behavior across species with harem-like social structures. Why? Because it makes genetic sense. Killing the male members of a tribe you conquer will grant your genetic material greater odds of spreading. What do you gain from keeping potentially dangerous conquered males around? And what do these conquered men gain (from a genetic perspective) from living if they have no chance of breeding? The conquered men would be almost certain to develop a strong genetic impulse to revolt were they to be denied their breeding rights, so it only makes sense to kill them. After all, this impulse to revolt in men who cannot access females can be seen even today in the higher rates of murder within polygynous cultures as well as the higher rates of terrorism seen in societies like modern day Egypt when social factors like an economic depression depress marriage rates.

Female attraction to violence is a very real strategy for a portion of the population. Virtually every serial killer has received tons of admiring love letters from female fans. These female fan letters dwarf the number of fan letters serial killers receive from male fans. Among tribes in which individuals still regularly kill other people, like the Yanomamo of the Amazon, men who have killed the most other men have the most wives and offspring, which suggests that, in aggregate, women systematically prefer murderers as mating partners when not polluted by the “civilized instinct” to not want to be seen dating a murderer. There is, nevertheless, a good reason why large societies do not celebrate murder: Once a human settlement reaches certain population levels, accepting murders on a societal level is not productive and thus cultural norms develop to isolate, shame, and otherwise neutralize murderers as social actors.

Why do we think raiding behavior was frequent? Human sexual differentiation in arousal tied to violence seems more baked in than most other gender-differentiated preferences. It would also seem that females’ tendency to be turned on by watching abuse against women is baked in uniquely deeply because it exists despite the fact today’s women grew up in a society in which they are told they should think less of themselves for getting turned on by being dominated and physically hurt by men. Women would only still indulge in this attraction at the levels we observe—in spite of the very strong societal pressure against it—if the selective pressure for it in our evolutionary history was very, very strong.

Smashing Babies on Rocks

Why do we think that raiding males killed babies? For starters, this behavior is seen in 25% of ape species. It makes sense to kill a group’s babies to get the females ready to breed again sooner, as nursing babies delay ovulation in females. Even peaceful gorillas go nuts on babies and smash them on rocks when a new dominant male comes to town.

We also have behavioral evidence for infanticide—or at least a lack of care for non-biological-children among fathers—in modern humans. Just peruse the survival rates of kids with stepdads while controlling for other life conditions. Survival rates are WAY lower if a stepchild is an infant or toddler. Subconsciously, some male behavior leads to the death of very young step kids (a child living with an unrelated adult has 50 timesthe odds of dying) and abuse is 10 times more likely when a stepparent lives in the home (though conscious self-interest may also contribute to this behavior).

The evidence suggesting baby killing that we find most compelling is actually biblical. The Old Testament has some of the earliest detailed accounts of what happened when ancient humans conquered a city and what they thought about that behavior. In the Old Testament, the practice of killing babies after conquering a city is actively encouraged: Psalm 137:9 “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” Not only is this exactly the way gorillas and chimps kill infants after deposing a dominant male (smashing babies against rocks), but if this were not an ancient tradition, we cannot think of a good reason for doing it. Killing babies by dashing them on rocks seems like a weird thing to do randomly when conquering a town, right? Humans in aggregate do not randomly commit unthinkable, violent acts without some benefit or cultural tradition behind them. For some reason, the first civilized humans believed that smashing babies on rocks was just part of standard operating procedure when conquering another group of humans.

A look at the behavior of recently contacted tribes, such as that of the Aché tribe, also supports a human infanticide instinct. Aché children of males who have died also die at much higher rates than children with living fathers. Infanticide is rare to non-existent in totally monogamous species with equal birth rates of males and females; there is just no strong reason to kill babies from a genetic perspective, which lends further support to the idea of early humans being polygynous.

This behavior presents strong evidence against early human societies being matriarchal. Species that tend toward matriarchies, such as bonobos, do not exhibit systematic male infanticide against children that are not their own (though they still show male bullying of other younger males—see the article: Aggression by male bonobos against immature individuals does not fit with predictions of infanticide).

Female Promiscuity

The impulse driving many men to have sex with a large number of people is hardly a mystery from an evolutionary perspective. More sexual partners lead to more surviving children for men and more children lead to more of whatever behavioral impulse created those children. We have already addressed the core reason a woman would benefit evolutionarily from covertly sleeping with individuals who are not her primary partner, but let’s do a deeper dive into evolutionary pressures motivating female promiscuity.[[31]](#_ftn31)

Contrary to a weirdly popular belief in some academic circles, it is not an effective evolutionary strategy for a woman to openly have sex with a variety of men in an effort to obscure the paternity of her children and thus shield them from infanticide. Studies on the Aché (an indigenous hunter-gatherer culture in Paraguay sometimes referred to as a potential model of what early human societies were like) suggest this tactic is moderately successful when a child has two potential fathers, but when a child has three potential fathers or more, their risk of death increases dramatically. Essentially, males do not care about children that only have a 33% chance of being theirs any more than they care about children who have no chance of being theirs. In real-world scenarios, clouding paternity almost never leads to more investment from males of a tribe.

Contrary to popular belief, a female’s drive to promiscuity cannot be explained by a desire for genetic diversity in her children. After all, how much could genetic diversity in children possibly increase the survival rate of a woman’s children: Maybe 15%, max? In theory, increased genetic diversity in a female’s offspring will increase the number of children that survive some specific diseases, (or a few other extremely specific circumstances from which local genetic variation could protect offspring). The problem is that women in these historical contexts would not have typically been able to find multiple partners with genes different enough to differentially protect certain children—plus tribes would not often be afflicted by one of the rare diseases against which some humans are conveniently genetically resistant. Furthermore, any disease-resistant benefits gained from having kids with more diverse genes would be mitigated by sexually transmitted disease in cultures that didn’t have antifungals or antibiotics.

Even if women desire multiple simultaneous partners at lower rates than men, there still has to be some evolutionary pressure motivating that portion of women who do strongly desire multiple partners. While not a perfect proxy, we say women want multiple partners at lower rates than men because in our modern culture they “cheat” much less often (with numbers ranging anywhere from men cheating 30% more frequently to at twice the rate of women). Still, many things may motivate a desire for multiple partners that are driven more by socialization and self-identity than arousal patterns and evolutionary pressures.

We already addressed the biggest evolutionary motivation by far: Women throughout history evolutionarily benefited from straying in order to breed with a male with great genes (social intelligence, attractiveness, dominance, etc.) who could not be convinced to raise these women’s children—all while still enjoying the support of a caregiver who is willing to raise children he believes to be his (hidden fertility and ovulatory shift provide evidence of this pressure). We can see this evolutionary motivator represented in current female behavior. When women cheat, it is more often than not with individuals who are “hotter” than their primary partners while males will cheat with significantly less attractive women just as readily as they will cheat with more attractive women. However, there are a few other motivators.

Infidelity appears to be more common among people who have specific types of oxytocin and vasopressin receptor genes. Vasopressin is a hormone related to social behaviors, including trust, empathy, and sexual bonding. A whopping 40% of instances of infidelity in women and 62% in men are partially influenced by oxytocin and vasopressin receptor genes. In these cases, this push toward cheating is a bleed over of evolutionary pressures pushing for more Machiavellian social tactics in non-romantic contexts.

Finally, cheating is not always sexual. Emotional affairs also exist, with 5% of men and 35% of women having admitted to having an emotional affair. We suspect the larger number of women having emotional affairs is either a product of women being more emotionally aware of what they are doing (and thus being more likely to admit to it on a survey) or women having more to gain from emotional affairs than men. More specifically, the mental reward pathways for the narrative around a relationship are stronger in women, leading emotionally driven affairs to be more likely to pull them towards infidelity.

If you think any of this makes our female ancestors look predatory, put their behavior in context. At least they do not have a history of maintaining giant harems, raiding tribes, raping unwilling sexual targets, and dashing babies against rocks, right? Nobody comes out smelling like roses.

Why Men are Aroused by Dominance

Even though men are aroused by dominance at lower rates than women, it is still worth asking why so many men find dominance arousing.

As to why women are aroused by dominance, the answer is fairly straightforward:

  1. Having a dominant partner massively reduces the risk of infanticide (we see this in the Aché, with dominant males sometimes killing the children of other males for shits and giggles (well, that’s the best way we can think to translate some of the stories anthropologists report). These killings are likely driven by an impulse to augment the resources to which these men’s own biological children have access. Having wimpy Nigel telling someone not to kill your kid is much less effective than Mike Dexter.
  2. In polygynous cultures, dominant males can get more resources and female partners, meaning that the genes that make them dominant will be passed on to their male children, thereby increasing the number of offspring those children have in turn. Women’s children are much more likely to have many descendants of their own if they carry the genes of a dominant member of their tribe, which increases women’s likelihood of finding dominance arousing.
  3. Dominance is a strong proxy for good genes overall. If an individual has a strong drive to act dominant but lacks the physical fitness to back up the position they seek, they are likely to be killed or expelled from the group—or at the very least, fail to attain a dominant position within the group. Females can therefore be fairly certain the larger “genetic package” a dominant male offers is top notch, increasing women’s probability of finding dominant partners arousing.

Back to the question at hand: Why are around half of men aroused by dominance? Recall that while 70% of men get turned on by seeing their partners act submissive, 49% get turned on by seeing partners act dominantly as well (contrast this with women, of whom only 27% get turned on by seeing their partner act submissive while 75% get turned on by seeing their partner act dominant). Why are males more aroused by dominant partners than females are aroused by submissive partners? Why are around half of males aroused by seeing dominance in a partner?

Consider the high school analogy we presented earlier, in which dominant Chad got iced and at least wimpy obsequious Nigel got a chance to breed with Sheena the goth with bad hygiene. In a chimp tribe, most male members are submissive to at least one other chimp. One dominant male—future astronaut Mike Dexter in our example—typically depends upon the support of his troupe’s submissive males to secure his role. This dominant male rewards supporting males with access to females—who, per what ovulatory shift indicates, would then sometimes covertly attempt to impregnate themselves with the dominant male’s genes.

It would therefore make sense that male sexual strategy would be divided into a high risk, high reward dominance pathway and a low risk, medium reward submission pathway. This would lead to a sizable portion of the male population being more aroused by taking on subservient roles. It also explains why men with less money are more turned on by acting submissive than men with more money (naturally submission is the better strategy for men with lower resources, as they are going to have a hard time beating a male with greater resources when deploying a dominance-based strategy).

Polymorphism

We could be either totally or partially wrong about everything.

If you take one particular species of cute grasshoppers and put them in a large group (or rub their legs for four hours with a Q-tip) they transform into the dreaded locust. Their behavior patterns and morphology completely transform into something monstrous. This is called polymorphism—and perhaps it has happened to humans.

Primates of a single genetic line can have multiple, entirely different “default” social structures that manifest depending on environmental resources and conditions (specifically we are thinking about Baboons here). Essentially, certain ecologies put primates into a different social “mode.”

What if humans work like this as well? What if we have a few different evolutionarily conditioned behavior patterns that appear in different circumstances? What if there is a switch in us at a young age that, through some environmental stimuli toggles on our ability to be sexually stimulated by dominance or/and submission? What if we are wrong about everything and socialization does really exist—not in a too-many-ads-depicting-skinny-women kind of way, but in an on/off-switch kind of way, triggered by weird things like childhood diet or your-family’s-perceived-position-within-the-local-dominance-hierarchy kind of way? What if something about post-industrial society is “switching” tons of women to a submissive stance—as well as many men, and therefore the distributions of arousal patterns we are seeing are not “natural”?

It would make sense: The two ecological conditions that most often cause a switch like this involve either growing up in a social group above a certain population threshold or growing up in a group that has a high level of access to resources. For example: Why risk dying to climb a social hierarchy if there are enough resources to go around? Wouldn’t it make sense for both males and females to differentially adopt submissive strategies in such an environment?

We got a little too excited by this line of thought, which ultimately inspired the survey we conducted and explore in depth in this book’s supplement. Sadly, through our surveys, we found no evidence of a polymorphic excuse—our ancestors were just monstrously terrible beings. (Though a preference for polyamory might have a polymorphic component in human females—more on that in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships.)

At any rate, present human kinks paint a picture (albeit a rough one) suggesting that most early human societies were patriarchies featuring a dominant male who had many partners that were semi-faithful—as well as a number of submissive males who also had access to a female or a few females they believed were faithful to them, but who were, in fact, not. Our interpretation of the evidence suggests that groups would frequently raid other groups, kill their men and babies, and absorb their women.

Bonobos

Some of our readers may be wondering at this point why we have not referred to bonobos, it has become popular to cite bonobo behavior as evidence that humans, in their natural state, would form free-loving, polyamorous, matriarchal communes. This view of bonobos has been aggressively pushed by those whose political agenda benefits from the belief that our distant ancestors lived in this kind of utopia.

First, we would point to the fact that women tend toward submissive sexual fantasies much more than men, that this tendency does not appear to be socialized, and male humans almost certainly have an infanticide impulse. This serves as fairly concrete evidence indicating that early humans did not interact like bonobos do (or at least how people believe Bonobos interact). Matriarchal utopias do not create evolutionary pressures nudging women to become turned on by violence against themselves or sexually aroused by men stomping on babies like Lucy McGillicuddy in a grape vat.

Furthermore, the concept of the peaceful, hypersexual, matriarchal, polyamorous bonobo is complete pseudoscience motivated by political fringe groups. Read The Naked Bonobo for a more in-depth review of the scientific literature about this species; it bucks the mainstream narrative (though it certainly has its own axe to grind). Real bonobo behavior is far more interesting than the myth and no less of a living nightmare than the situation we propose for early human social structures.

For example:

There is no perfect society out there, hidden in the mists of our distant history, enjoyed by some undiscovered tribe, or orchestrated by another species of ape. People desperately want to believe that if they just travel far enough and pull back that last bit of dense foliage they will finally find, like some sort of social El Dorado, some obvious and easy utopia.

The Pragmatists of the world know where our hidden utopia lies: It is not being lived out by some faraway tribe or described on a dusty tablet chiseled by our ancestors. Our ideal society lies in the future we have the power to create. Optimal societies aren’t easy, they aren’t obvious, and they certainly aren’t about following some simplistic ideological doctrine to the letter. An enlightened society will be nuanced, slow to build, and in need of constant experimentation. Citizens of a truly perfect society must update their beliefs about the world as they try new things to see whether they succeed or fail. No one alive today knows how to create this glittering society—not yet. The best anyone of our generation can hope for is to climb Mount Nebo and catch a glimpse of what might be. For now, we must be content with our lot as one of many diligently marching the desert. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by the glittering idols of simple, easy answers.

Every day we reap the rewards of ancestors who suffered so that our species might ascend from the total depravity of our primordial conditions and basal instincts. We spit on their sacrifice by not doing our part to advance the flame of civilization because it is that flame which holds back the darkness both in the world and within ourselves.

Yikes . . . we blacked out there for a second. Did we just go on another crazy rant? You can see we are literally driven to madness by the bizarre concept that we should rediscover and try to recreate our distant ancestors’ way of life.

Note from the Research:

The Slave Race?

One of the wackiest revelations about humanity we had while writing this book occurred to us on a morning walk as we discussed selective pressures that might have given birth to certain kinks. Simone turned to Malcolm and asked, “Malcolm, are we a slave race? Are humans a slave race?”—and gosh darn it, it wasn’t a dumb question. The fact that such a juicy question isn’t a ridiculous line of thought compels us to explore it further.

Most of the selective pressures exerted on our species throughout our history were applied to servants, slaves, surfs, etc. Very few people are at the top of the totem pole. Historically speaking, almost everyone had a master and those few humans without masters didn’t have as many selective pressures applied to their cognition. If you mess up as a master, you probably still breed and your kids probably still survive, whereas if you mess up as a surf, you are screwed. Even in present-day situations with strict dominance hierarchies, the only way to gain a position of dominance is through becoming skilled at holding a subservient position (most of the time, people who become bosses get the job because they are good at being employees—not at being bosses).

Is it possible that humans are so optimized for subservience that they feel fundamentally uncomfortable with power when they ultimately luck into it? In the Great Chain of Being (a medieval hierarchical structure), even the king was understood to be a servant of God (and everyone else was a servant under the king, his direct reports, their direct reports, etc.). Modern presidents and prime ministers frame themselves “servants of the people.” CEOs of giant conglomerates talk about themselves as slaves to their shareholders. It seems the more power a person gains, the more they subconsciously try to frame themselves as subservient to a master.

Perhaps freedom is merely aspirational—not a burden which humans are optimized to shoulder. Perhaps forcing freedom upon a species that evolved to serve places a huge burden upon their shoulders and rips at the edges of their sanity, forcing them to invent fictional masters or slowly become burdened with ever-increasing anxiety, depression, self-doubt, megalomania, and narcissism. Perhaps robbing humans of masters creates unfillable voids at the backs of their minds.

There’s an obscure, otherwise-unremarkable anime from the early 2000s called DearS (ディアーズ, Diāzu) that features a fascinating core conflict: Essentially, humanity’s first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials is with a crashed ship of a species genetically engineered to be slaves. These extraterrestrial humanoids feel deeply unfulfilled when they don’t get to live out this role for which they were designed, but given modern human societies’ prejudices against the concept of slavery, they end up hiding their nature from humanity and are forced instead to play the role of a magnanimous ambassador of peace and technology instead of their preferred role of slave. The show’s central thesis is the only type of freedom that matters is being able to choose who or what you are a slave to—that being in such a position is more enviable than not being a slave. We mention this show because it highlights a truth about our modern culture: It is fundamentally, deeply, uncomfortable with the idea of subordination being anyone’s preferred state.

But of course, we couldn’t possibly be insinuating that humans have any parallels to this fictional alien race, right?

The survey we ran when putting together this book certainly surprised[[32]](#_ftn32) us on this point:

Could it be that the key to happiness, mental health, and personal fulfillment lies in service and complete dedication to a genuinely worthy individual, ideology, or vision of one’s choosing?

Western society has an obsession with power and an inability to tolerate any worldview that doesn’t strive for it above all else. Even groups that are presumably open to those wanting different things from life exhibit this deep discomfort: In the BDSM community it is not uncommon to hear people go on about how the sub is really the one with the power (a sub is the subordinate partner in a dominant-submissive coupling) and in the poly community, people frequently belittle the concept of someone “belonging” to someone else.

As we point out in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, the idea that all humans everywhere are always better off being their own masters seems to have emerged from Western cultural traditions and come into being fairly recently. This bias certainly did not yet exist at the time of The Great Chain Of Being. Favoritism of self-determination also does not seem to have been appropriated from Eastern traditions or indigenous populations during the time of colonialism.

Society’s present phobias around the surrender of power appear to be tied to the emergence of capitalism in the West and an association between power and wealth. This general phobia of power relinquishment could also be a reaction to chattel slavery, but we doubt this, as the idea’s spread aligns more with the ascension of capitalism than with any spike in chattel slavery.

Do we really think that humans are a slave race, languishing in cultures that grind us down, forcing us to saddle ourselves with the burdens of freedom and autonomy? Not really.

More of our species’ relevant evolutionary history took place in environments in which most socially oriented evolutionary pressures involved navigating small, local dominance hierarchies, which have nothing to do with slavery—though these structures did, nevertheless, sometimes favor those who knew their place and when to defer to those higher on the totem pole.

But damn if it isn’t a cool perspective we hadn’t heard before. And who knows? Maybe it is true. Maybe real freedom should be defined as getting to choose your master, be it a person, organization, or an ideal. Maybe true bliss can only be found when you find a worthy something to which you can holistically subordinate your life and needs.

Human Sexuality’s Advanced Settings

Now that we have explored what arouses people, why various things arouse different people, and what human arousal patterns imply about our historical societies, it is time to start digging into some of our “advanced settings.” The following chapters explore how various systems interact with our higher cognition, some of our most basal human sensory systems, and each other.

Specifically, we will look at:

Olfactory Cues in Arousal and Pair Bonding

Do pheromones affect mate choice in humans? The answer is an overwhelming . . . Probably. Subconscious olfactory cues do seem to play a role in who one finds attractive, however, the effects are light. Olfactory cues should be viewed more as an amusing novelty and less as something around which one will be able to develop a meaningful sexual strategy. More importantly, many claims based on olfactory cues in arousal and pair bonding are probably bunk, such as the claim that human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system, a gene complex encoding the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins, has a large effect on attraction. To be honest, the people doing much of the research in this field have a financial benefit in the public believing their findings due to various companies they started, which has us reviewing their work with an extra level of scrutiny.

If many claims about smells and arousal are false, what is probably true?

We can assume with some confidence that both men and women use their senses of smell to modulate both their pair bonding and arousal pathways—mostly in subconscious ways—with the effects being more powerful in women than men. People who are more sensitive to smell consistently rate their sexual experiences as more pleasant. This is true among both men and women. Women who are more sensitive to smell even appear to have more frequent orgasms.

Several rather famous experiments imply that we can use our noses to detect all sorts of useful information about a partner. The human sense of smell appears to be capable of detecting how symmetrical and thus genetically healthy a partner is likely to be, whether or not a woman is ovulating. Human smell also appears to be able to estimate the attractiveness of a particular subject with a fair degree of accuracy. However, one is unlikely to feel these subconscious effects enough to put a finger on exactly what is causing them. For example, when we say a man can detect when someone is ovulating by smell, what we mean is that men slightly prefer the smell of shirts of women who are ovulating, and that their apparent ability to detect the slight difference in smell between ovulating and non-ovulating women is strong enough that their preference for ovulating women’s shirts held as long as a week after the shirts were stored at room temperature. This slight preference for certain smells hardly suggests that men are sniffing out women as though they are bears.

Other studies’ findings suggest that when a woman is more fertile, she will find male smells more pleasant and may even release chemicals that increase the testosterone of her pair-bonded partner. Furthermore, women find the smell of attractive men differentially better when they are more fertile. In the context of mostly concealed human fertility periods, this suggests there was an evolutionary pressure for women to not always find more attractive men more sexually compelling, which adds to the already-mentioned evidence of a long evolutionary history of women pair bonding with one partner, then becoming impregnated by another (more attractive) partner.

Can we wear body spray to become more attractive? The answer is . . . sort of. There have been studies showing that people are more attractive when wearing certain body sprays and perfumes, but other studies performed using the same methodology without allowing the judger to smell the target observed the same effects. In other words, it is not the smell itself that increases attractiveness, but the smell’s effect on one’s confidence that makes one more attractive by changing posture and stance. That said, due to the close connection between smell and memory, smells can be used to elicit attraction from individuals through non-arousal pathways (e.g., wearing the same cologne as a father figure with whom the target had a good relationship could evoke trust, familiarity, or fondness).

Random fun findings on smells from various studies:

Gender Displays

Some humans appear to have an impulse compelling them to perform gender displays in which they act out a particular gender stereotype in an exaggerated fashion.[[33]](#_ftn33) Many species signal sex through behavior patterns and in humans, gender is often used as a social proxy for the sex of an individual.

Even though the current social cues we associate with being male or female are ephemeral and tied tightly to the society in which we live, subconscious systems for bundling social cues into “gender packages” appear to be quite old in that at least two gender packages can be observed in every culture ever studied, historic or modern (though it is not uncommon for cultures to have more than two). The gender system is so deeply pre-programed into the human brain that it frequently imposes itself on inanimate objects and abstract concepts—as can be seen by the fact that 40% of languages feature grammatical gender (English speakers encounter grammatical gender applied to inanimate objects most frequently when learning Spanish or other romance languages, but grammatical gender occasionally surfaces in English as well, with objects like ships being granted female pronouns).

Without some neurological system compelling us to see the word in terms of “gender packages,” [[34]](#_ftn34) it would be unlikely that a system like grammatical gender, which adds little utility, would be retained, evolve so frequently, and evolve independently (grammatical gender can be found in everything from the Indo-European language families to the Afro-Asiatic language families). [[35]](#_ftn35)

While it seems the primary purpose of “gender packages” was originally to serve as a proxy for the sex of the individual displaying them, the concept of gender also appears to have been hijacked to signal other social roles (especially in societies featuring more than two “gender packages” of behaviors).

We see the mental systems we use to pick up on these gender packages as being analogous to the mental systems we use to learn languages. As with our concepts of male and female, English is an evanescent product or our current culture. Though our distant ancestors did not use English to communicate, mental systems evolved in them that simultaneously facilitate our ability to learn English and, to an extent, compel us to learn it (children do not choose to learn English). Just as a person is subconsciously compelled to learn language from their environment at a young age, they also pick up their society’s “gender language” at a young age. In the same way babies feel an impulse to babble—or adults feel an impulse to yell an obscenity—a person might be subconsciously compelled to “blurt out” gender displays. And as with language, concepts of gender change with time and distance and may even be seen varying in the gender equivalent of regional “accents.”[[36]](#_ftn36)

While watching gender displays leads to a sexually charged arousal response, the brain pathways that drive us to make these gender displays do not appear to be sexual in nature (well, not usually; there are always exceptions such as transvestic fetishism in which a person gets aroused by cross-dressing). In other words, by and large, people do not appear to become aroused by acting manly or girly outside of the context of our association between these gender roles and dominance/submission due to cultural connections (this is called petticoating or pinaforing), however people do appear to be sexually aroused by seeing others make these displays. In the majority of the population, gender displays are not motivated by an arousal pathway and are instead driven by an entirely separate impulse system.

Male cross-dressing behavior is the most socially visible example of a strong gender display impulse. Importantly, cross-dressing rarely involves just wearing the clothing of another gender, but also entails acting out a full gender display, including everything from gate to vocal pitch and mannerisms. While many are tempted to assume cross-dressing is a sign of being trans or gay, it just so happens that the majority of cross-dressers are married, cisgendered, straight men, which makes the cultural trope of the cross-dressing gay man really strange. We assume this trope emerged from drag culture (which represents a vanishingly small proportion of the cross-dressing population)—because drag participants do skew LGBT.

We need to be careful when conflating drag culture with cross-dressing, as only a tiny minority of cross-dressers identify with drag culture. Moreover, not everyone who participants in drag culture feels the gender display impulse. For many, drag culture is a form of performance art that grants an opportunity to artistically explore gender norms. If we return to the language analogy, drag can be thought of as a form of “gender poetry”. Furthermore, drag is only one of many artistic traditions that involve cross-dressing. Just because someone is cross-dressing for art’s sake does not mean they are in “drag.” For example, Yarō-Kabuki (modern Kabuki theater) often involves cross-dressing, yet it has no cultural connection to the drag movement.

The apparent fact that most cross-dressers are straight, cisgendered men[[37]](#_ftn37) indicates that trans people are not trans just because of a gender display impulse mix-up. There is a huge difference between an urge to make a gender display and an urge to be a gender.[[38]](#_ftn38)

While some men appear to have kinks tied to cross-dressing that do activate their arousal systems (e.g. transvestic fetishism and pinaforing), a portion of cross-dressers make it very clear that this behavior is not activating their arousal systems but that some other impulse is driving them to engage in the behavior. We see no reason why a male cross-dresser would lie about this lack of arousal, as this is not a claim made by a large portion of those who openly indulge in any other “kink.” Given that cross-dressing is not activating an arousal system, but instead activating a gender display pathway system, we are somewhat uncomfortable even calling cross-dressing a kink. Instead, cross-dressing should be thought of its own unique thing, not tied to gender identity but also not tied to arousal.

Cross-dressing impulses seem to be tied to some innate brain pathway not working as “intended” and are clearly not a product of socialization. Straight, cisgendered men have not been taught by society to dress up like women in private. There is no social benefit to this behavior. That said, some gender displays cross-dressers choose to make are either socialized or made more compelling through conditioning, as a cross-dresser in the US will put on a very different display than one in Japan. If we return to the language analogy, cross-dressing could be thought of as comparable to Tourette syndrome (with Coprolalia) in that a Japanese person with Tourette’s will use different words than an American with Tourette’s—yet the underling neurological pathways compelling the behavior are the same. As with Tourette’s, the fact that the words being said are influenced by a person’s culture is not evidence that the behavior overall is a product of socialization (and comparing Tourette’s with poetry in that language—drag in this analogy—would be seen is wildly offensive).

Gender displays are also not merely under the jurisdiction of cross-dressers. We see gender display systems being manipulated by environmental factors even when they are working as intended (by “working as intended,” we mean signaling one’s sex to the opposite sex using the proxy of our social concept of gender through behavior patterns such as tonality, gate, and clothing).

There is some cool research showing that females exaggerate gender displays (as measured through social media posting) in societies featuring high income inequality, but not in societies featuring high gender inequality. We imagine this is the product of some sort of polymorphic switch triggered by situations of high income inequality that lead women to prefer polygynous strategies to monogamous strategies. This makes sense given that, in a society in which one man has the wealth of thirty, it is evolutionarily better to be one of his ten wives than the sole charge of a poor man. This exaggeration of sexual displays in cultures with high income inequality means that such cultures present beautiful case studies of uniquely extreme gender displays.

One fascinating study suggested that in Western societies, men do not automatically sexualize women based on revealing clothing or bare skin but do sexualize women who are posing provocatively. This suggests that when a woman strikes a “gender display pose,” it triggers something in the male brain causing him to sexualize her entire gender display, including her clothing, meaning a gender display always consists of both clothing and body language and that body language is the trigger for sexualizing the clothing.[[39]](#_ftn39)

We enthusiastically encourage you to check out the pictures used in this study, as they make the results even more impactful. The study is titled: Revealing Clothing Does Not Make the Object: ERP Evidences That Cognitive Objectification is Driven by Posture Suggestiveness, Not by Revealing Clothing. If you don’t have time to dig up the study, we encourage you to consider instances in which you’ve observed people wearing little or no clothing and not sexualized them due to their postures (consider a naked woman in a medical textbook picture or a woman showing exposed breasts in a National Geographic article).

Bits and pieces of other research also seem to suggest that exaggerated gender displays are much more common among a population’s poorer groups and more valued as a sign of attractiveness within these groups. This is perhaps what fuels stereotypes involving poorer women displaying more exaggerated hip sways, longer nails, tanned skin, higher heels, longer hair, more ostentatious jewelry, etc. We are not sure why this would be. Exaggerated gender displays among the poor may be tied to the economic inequality predictor discussed above, but we do not think the dynamic explains everything about this difference, as stats from our survey show that wealthy western men prefer women with lower levels of female gender displays.

It seems to us (though this will be seen as controversial by some) as though the impulse for male gender displays in humans may be incredibly weak. As evidence for this, consider the relative rarity of straight, cisgender, female cross-dressers when contrasted with straight, cisgender, male cross-dressers. Contemplate the relative absence of studies showing how environmental conditions exaggerate male gender display behavior.

That said, anecdotally, it seems as though poorer men exaggerate masculine gender displays in a pattern similar to that presented by poorer women (with their exaggerated feminine gender displays). When we contrast image searches showing examples of “male runway fashion” against image searches showing examples of “male street fashion,” male runway fashion looks significantly more feminine.

The paucity of studies showing male gender displays changing with economic conditions could be explained by a dearth of research attempts, while the rarity of straight, cisgender female cross-dressers could be a product of women not being noticed so much when wearing male clothing. If a woman sometimes feels like wearing male clothing, we doubt she or anyone else would think of it as something worth noting. It may be that we simply don’t notice male gender display impulses as much as female gender display impulses, even though they could be just as common.

Is Being Trans More Common Than We Think?

If being trans is not the product of a gender display impulse, what is it? As we mentioned at the beginning of this book, this is not a topic we will explore in detail. Not only is the research on this subject evolving quickly and the whole thing a question of self-identity rather than sexuality, but we personally don’t find questions around why someone might want to identify as a particular gender as interesting as questions about more perplexing stuff—like why someone may want to be a slave, watch someone die, have sex with an animal, or get turned on by seeing a person get eaten (all of which are more common than identifying as trans, which only 0.6% of the population does). In contrast to all the wild aspects of human sexuality, the gender with which a person identifies seems like a rather pedestrian point, which makes society’s intense focus on it quite bizarre.[[40]](#_ftn40) (This is not to belittle the struggles trans people go through because of society’s wacky fixation on the topic.)

Our intuition is that the factors that influence people to be trans make up a constellation of five or eight totally unrelated things that manifest similarly enough to each other that they cause individuals to be persecuted due to the same set of societal prejudices. By dumping all of these disparate factors into the same category and attempting to research them, the results will always end up muddled.

The concept of being trans is not the first concept that would have been grossly oversimplified by academics and professionals for a period; consider the widespread diagnoses of hysteria in the 1800s. Were this the 19th century, we would be saying: This thing called “hysteria” is probably at least a dozen unrelated conditions with superficially similar pathologies. During the 1800s, “hysteria” basically meant “women acting moody” and covered everything from clinical depression to ovulatory mood changes. As one might imagine, studying these usually unrelated factors as if they were the same basic thing would lead to garbage research findings. It also would not be the first time society did something like this. Back when we did not understand gayness very well, it was common to lump cross-dressers and gay people into the same category, when literally their only similarity is: “Sometimes they do something another gender does.”

Despite the concept of demigender being around for a long time, a huge blind spot we also see in the current state of trans research is an assumption in the way data is collected that most individuals who publicly appear cisgender strongly identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. Our intuition is that a large portion of what is thought of as the cis population is either not that attached to their gender or has a slight preference for a gender incongruous to their birth sex and just maintains their cisgender expression to fit in.

Sadly, we can’t use the prefix demi to refer to this group as we suspect a lot of them change their preferred gender and “demifluid” can mean something totally different. Thus, let’s use the term “soft“ (e.g., soft-trans, soft-cis, soft-genderfluid, etc.).

This concept matters because we suspect this soft-gender group wildly outnumbers the trans population and may even outnumber the “hard-cisgendered” population. When you look at communities in which people have a choice of gender expression, be they online video games, D&D sessions, or furry conventions, you see fairly high rates of people assuming identities as another gender. In online games, 23% of men prefer to roleplay as females and 7% of women prefer to roleplay as men, meaning an average of 15% of the population prefers to roleplay as another gender. Given that 0.6% of the population identifies as trans, this suggests that roughly 14% of the population might have a slight preference for sometimes identifying as a gender different from the sex they were assigned at birth when given the chance to do so recreationally. (Naturally other things drive desires to play other-gendered video game characters, like getting to look at the opposite gender’s butt all day, but you get the idea behind this thought experiment.)

You may be thinking: “Hold on—a desire to roleplay as another gender in a game is nothing like being trans.” As people who do not feel a strong connection to our genders, we have a hard time trying to mentally model what it would feel like to be trans, so we have to go on what trans people say about their experiences.[[41]](#_ftn41) In a number of stories, we could find trans people first came to terms with their gender identity through games or other roleplaying environments.[[42]](#_ftn42) Given these reported experiences, it would seem irresponsible to dismiss that a large chunk of the population that would otherwise be thought of as cisgendered feels more comfortable role playing as a gender that doesn’t align with the sex they were assigned at birth. We should at least humor the possibility that some of the population may have a very “low volume” gender identity instead of assuming that a gender identity is only valid when it is at “max volume.” We know that demigender and agender people exist; is it really that offensive to think that a portion of the population may exist somewhere in between these states? If such people did exist and grew up in a culture hostile to trans identities, how do you suspect their identities would present themselves? To us it seems they would look for opportunities to experiment with other genders in contexts in which they felt protected by prevailing social

norms.

| | Female | Male | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | 14% | 15% | | 2 | 10% | 6% | | 3 | 11% | 15% | | 4 | 20% | 15% | | 5 | 45% | 49% |

We dove deeper into our musings on this front with the survey we ran, asking the respondents who identified as cis: “How attached are you to your current gender? In other words, would it bother you if you learned you had to live the rest of your life as another gender?” Participants then answered on a 1 to 5 scale using a slider with 1 indicating the low end of the sale (that it would not bother them at all) and 5 indicating the high end.

These results suggest that over half the population is not extremely attached to their gender. In addition, our survey suggests that, as we suspected, people who have little attachment to their gender are actually super common, making up 24% of females and 21% of males.

This finding suggests that agender people—people who do not identify with a gender—are 24 times more common than people who identify as trans men and women. To avoid confusion: Agender is different from neutrois, which describes an attachment to being genderless and androgyne, which describes an attachment to some aspects of both male and female genders (though how specifically these words are used varies from group to group and individual to individual).

In addition to being interesting, these results have a few important implications for trans individuals, and one in particular that stands out: Attempting to generate sympathy by asking others to “think about how it would feel if you had to live as the other gender” is highly likely to backfire if you ask said hypothetical question to an individual who would not care because they do not have a strong attachment to their gender, which you have about a one in five chance of doing.

As we mentioned earlier, gay people run into a similar problem: Studies show individuals who have low sex drives are much more likely to be homophobic, presumably in part because the argument: “Imagine what it would feel like if you had to live your whole life pretending to be attracted to a gender you are not attracted to” does not resonate with them in the slightest, seeing as the scenario simply wouldn’t bother them that much.[[43]](#_ftn43)

Based on the data discussed, we suspect that the soft-trans and soft-genderfluid groups make up roughly 14% of the population, the agender population makes up ~15% of the population, and the soft-cis population comprises approximately 20%, while those traditionally thought of as cis people only make up around 50% of the population (with the other 1% being comprised of those with other non-binary gender identities and trans individuals).[[44]](#_ftn44)

The Mating Party Impulse Hypothesis

While contemplating the gender display impulse, we find ourselves wondering if humans have other non-sexual impulses meant to aid in mate acquisition. Let’s call an additional impulse that might exist “the mating party impulse.”

Across cultures and time, humans have independently developed a type of party that looks remarkably similar—in which people cover their faces (often with animal masks or masks representing other fictional entities), adopt different identities, and dance to music at night. From masquerade balls (the type held in the late medieval period—not the modern interpretation) to furry conventions, the Bal des Ardents, bugaku, and the tribal dances of the ancient Americas, Africa, Europe, Australia, and Asia, this mating dance impulse can be seen. We even see what could be parties that look like this in some of the earliest human records (hieroglyphs).

These gatherings do not seem like a natural thing for so many disconnected cultures to develop in isolation without some deeper instinct compelling such behavior. We wish this were an impulse we felt ourselves so we could attempt to isolate it and identify the mental or sexual system to which it feels closest. Still, we are absolutely delighted by the insinuation that “fursonas”—the alternate animal identities furries take on when in costume—might epitomize a deep, cross-cultural human impulse.

The Effect of Attractiveness on Moral Judgments

We often think of arousal patterns as existing in a vacuum—or at least only affecting things like mate selection. However, arousal patterns can have a massive impact on even the highest orders of cognition, such as those involved in judging what is moral and what is immoral. The effect of attractiveness on the public’s perception of morality is a well-studied phenomenon. To keep it short: Studies roughly show a 100% to 300% increase in the sentencing of unattractive individuals by judges.

Some studies suggest that a perpetrator’s attractiveness mostly influences the punishment deemed appropriate rather than a verdict of guilt or innocence (this is seen disproportionately when a judge is making the decision), while other studies indicate that attractiveness affects perception of guilt or innocence as well (this is seen disproportionately when a mock jury is making the decision).

In rape trials, defendants are seen as being more likely to be guilty and deserving of a harsher sentence when the victim is more attractive. Conversely, the perpetrator is often given a less severe punishment and is less likely to be found guilty when they are more attractive.

We see mixed findings from studies investigating how the attractiveness of a rape victim may affect others’ perceived responsibility for their own rape. Some research suggests that attractiveness has no effect, while other research suggests that white victims are judged as more responsible for their own rape when they are more attractive and non-white victims are seen as more responsible when they are less attractive. Sometimes society is more reprehensible than kittens in a wheat thresher.

The Role of Validation in Human Sexuality

Despite all our discussion of arousal and different factors that influence an individual’s sexuality, we must point to what we see to be a huge elephant in the room: Sexuality, as fascinating as it is, is not the primary motivator for sex in humans. Heck, sexuality is not even the primary factor explaining how we conceptualize ourselves as sexual beings. As is the case with almost all areas of life, the thing that drives most human behavior when a person is living on autopilot (as most people are) is a drive for self-validation.

**While socialization cannot affect what actually arouses you, it can affect the sexual acts in which you partake, which partners you choose, and how you react to sexual arousal.**

People maintain mental character sheets detailing who they think they are and who they want to be. When humans operate on autopilot, not consciously thinking about their actions and thoughts, most action is driven by how we subconsciously think these internal characters should react (e.g., “I am a wholesome patriot with two kids and a loving wife; how would a wholesome patriot husband and father react to X?”).

Our desired self-images have such a profound effect on our sexuality that even in private, many people who find themselves aroused by unusual stimuli do not act on those impulses out of a fear of seeing themselves as a deviant. Simultaneously, others may engage in sexual activity which they personally find actively aversive to play out a self-identity that should find such activity arousing.

The human drive to act out an ideal internal character manifests quite colorfully on the kink front. Someone aroused by humiliation, submission, and pain whose internal character is culturally conservative and by no means deviant would be unable to explore these arousal pathways through BDSM practices, seeing them as deviant. Such an individual may ultimately settle on a spanking kink, as they find spanking to be the only way to exercise that arousal pathway while also still believing they are a wholesome, culturally traditional and respectable person.[[45]](#_ftn45)

Different default self-images (the bases of those internal character sheets we subconsciously reference when reacting to various scenarios) are imposed on men and women who do not consciously decide what they value and what sort of internal self-image will help them best maximize those values. While we can’t find robust data systematically naming, organizing, and validating ideals imposed on women and men, we have seen common gender-based standards cause serious problems for each gender and would love to highlight some in the event it might help some readers evade certain traps.Just keep in mind that the trends we observe are pulled from qualitative, self-reported experiences (mostly collected unscientifically from a broad range of reddit threads and YouTube videos in which people share personal details about their lives).

Women: In general, women are socialized to want to be desired/wanted by individuals they respect. In addition, most women in modern Western societies (further motivated by current political trends) feel a strong desire to see themselves as independent and in control. This desire often comes into conflict with submissive arousal pathways common in both females and males.

Men: In general, men are socialized to want to be virile protectors who are needed. When men are single, being virile means having sex with a multitude of high-value women who, ideally, come away amazed by the interaction. In marriage, male virility means having a wife who other men envy. Note that, from the perspective of validation, it is irrelevant whether a man himself finds his wife or sexual partners attractive. A man who may feel genuinely sexually aroused by obese women will receive less validation from an extremely overweight partner should she be low value on the open market. Men raised in more conservative environments will also have a desire to see themselves as dominant (which, again, comes into conflict with submissive arousal pathways common in both males and females).

It is hilarious how society has tried to reconcile the fact that women are socialized to want control/independence while men are socialized to desire dominance, as these desires conflict (not everyone can be in control and dominant). This mismatch produces bizarre tropes of families in which the male is technically dominant, but the woman ultimately controls everything he does. We see this as comical, as with the slightest bit of critical thought, a person would see how toxic such a dynamic would be.

Another toxic result of modern societies’ current models is exemplified by people using sex to feel desired. The negative consequences of this can be seen on the lips of every person who has bemoaned having been “used for sex”—a phrase that really means someone expected to get something other than sex from the sexual interaction. People complain about being used for sex when they intended to trade sex for something and feel they didn’t receive a fair trade. When probed to elaborate on this complaint, people usually explain they expected to feel desired—that they wanted to feel treasured in exchange for sexual access yet did not feel as such after the encounter. This is a sad scenario, but the hypocrisy of this complaint is humorous in light of the fact that those making it had just planned to use another person to harvest an emotional state themselves—that of feeling desired/wanted. The “using” goes both ways.

Both men and women often tie the frequency with which they have sex to some sense of self-worth or their estimation of a relationship’s health when it is not at all unusual for there to be periods in a relationship in which sex just isn’t of much interest to the parties involved. Even when a relationship experiences a real sexual problem, it is probably best to contextualize it as a technical, sexual issue and not some larger issue in which a particular partner is at fault.

A man’s desire to be sexually active with many high-value women who are amazed by his performance also leads to destructive and darkly amusing consequences. We have witnessed men expend more effort on harvesting the emotions they get from knowing they got their partner to come than actually attempting to give a partner what the partner wants. We have also seen men choose to have sex with women when they clearly did not find those women or that sex arousing, all because doing so allowed them to feel virile.

It is probably best for wellbeing if one views any sexual problems as just isolated sexual problems rather than larger issues for which one or one’s partner is at fault. One study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that women who contextualized themselves or their partners as the cause of sexual problems tended to have a lower wellbeing. In contrast, women who saw any problems as specifically sexual tended to report higher wellbeing.

How Kinks Express Themselves

“Kink” and “paraphilia” are words given to any stimulus culturally considered socially deviant that sexually arouses some portion of the population. This strikes us as a very silly way to separate out aspects of normal human sexuality.

Essentially, something is a kink until society accepts it. Being gay was a paraphilia in the DSM until 1973 and sadomasochism is likely on its way out of the DSM now as well. Being gay lost its kink status as soon as society (on average) accepted it. BDSM is losing its kink status because it is becoming more mainstream. **Any kink/paraphilia designation is more useful in understanding a society than it is in understanding human sexuality.**

If our theory on what functionally causes “kinks” is correct, things that we generally consider to be single kinks are likely only superficial manifestations of more varied and nuanced sexual arousal pathways. For example, fat admirers—a group we have referenced repeatedly in this book as they represent, by far, one of the most common kinks—are likely comprised of people driven by three or four unrelated arousal pathways (which can overlap in a single person—one individual could be turned on by all of these pathways at the same time).

The first subgroup is comprised of people who either don’t have an aversion pathway tied to individuals who deviate too much from a medically-recommended BMI or whose pathway is set to an inverse position (we presented evidence for this group earlier in the book when sharing how, on average, men who report finding women far over a “normal BMI” to be attractive are also much more likely to report finding women far under a “normal BMI” to be attractive than the control group). Another subgroup features feeders, who become turned on by feeding a partner and seeing the results of overfeeding a partner. Feeders receive pleasure from the “emotional states and concepts” category of impulses (this is arousal from an early evolutionary pathway involved in social groups). The third subgroup is comprised of a type of dom often classified as a feeder who gets off on creating a partner that is unable to fend for themselves or survive without them. A final subgroup is made up of subs who interpret the feeling of being crushed during intercourse with their partner on top with domination or just having a partner much larger than them as being a proxy for submission. These people might like to be laid upon by an overweight partner (sometimes called a squasher). Thus two individuals who both identify as having the same kink might have entirely different sets of underling arousal patterns, some of which we may not have mentioned here.

A precise understanding of what drives sexual impulses can empower one to more easily maximize them.

Another good example of a kink that is likely composed of several different arousal pathways is vorarephilia: A kink in which a human receives an arousal impulse from observing a predator-prey relationship—typically with the interaction ending in the prey being swallowed whole and not otherwise injured (this is referred to as “soft vore,” a simple example of which would involve a snake eating a mouse it did not crush, which contrasts with the rarer “hard vore,” which involves more fatal scenes—like a lion eating a zebra). While there is likely a core group of people genuinely getting off on the concept of the predator-prey relationships, other arousal impulse pathways that cause the proliferation of this category of porn include getting off on the extreme dom-sub nature of predation, getting off from a sign flip in the necrophilia aversion impulse, getting off on the “feeder” pathway discussed above, and getting off on activating a supernormal stimulus for the concept of “being inside” someone (the subconscious reasoning being: “if part of me being inside a girl is good, all of me being inside a girl is better!”). Despite these highly divergent arousal pathways, all these various subgroups may receive sexual stimuli from illustrations of a person being “fed” another person whole. That these various groups are targeted by similar erotic art leads to the categorization of “vore” as a single kink.

Consider also bimbofication, in which an individual is transformed into a female exhibiting an extremely exaggerated gender display. Typically, bimbofication starts with either a man or a woman who looks professional being forcibly transformed into a vapid-looking and vapid-acting “bimbo.” This transformation would activate arousal pathways as varied as the dom/sub pathway (due to the forceful nature of the transition) to those associated with breeding target detection through gender displays. Observation of the bimbofication process may even activate pathways associated with impulses that cause some men to desire to make female gender displays. Again, multiple arousal pathways end up getting categorized as a single “kink.”

We cannot get over how fun it is to search through random and weird types of porn and try to determine what about it could be arousing to someone. Sometimes you just find something uniquely weird and all you can think is: But why??? Consider, for example, the following categories of porn: people stuck in quicksand, people compressed into cubes, and oviposition (people implanted with eggs). We see each of these as a bizarre puzzle that, if put together correctly, could present profound insights into how the human brain is really processing stuff by showing us how it can “break” in a way that yields these fascinating interests.

What about the mysterious case of the Minnesota Popper—the man who apparently got off on popping exercise balls? This man could be exhibiting a confluence of the looner kink (people who are aroused by balloons) and a popping kink (people who are aroused by seeing things pop). These kinks may be tied to early emotional pathways of anticipation and release though different people in these communities interpret their arousal differently. The Minnesota popper likely built a connection between this anticipation and release cycle and poppable objects. Exercise balls gave the Minnesota Popper access to a supernormal stimulus within this category. This is how a system that was supposed to get him to breed led to his breaking into buildings to pop exercise balls.

The Omegaverse as an Erotic Genre

Sometimes multiple sexual expressions and kinks coalesce into a single genre of arousing material. A great example of this can be seen with A/B/O—also known as the Omegaverse genre. Born from fanfiction and consumed by a primarily female audience, the Omegaverse presents a fictional, alternate reality. Works dabbling in this genre often divide their worlds’ inhabitants and characters into three types (each type can be either male or female).

This alternate reality amps up everything associated with traditional gender roles but dissociates these exaggerated roles from gender. Here we have a society run by a dominant, aggressive—somewhat “rapey”—class that is capable of impregnating others (be they male or female) and within it lives another group that is submissive and capable of bearing children (regardless of whether they are male or female).

Why would someone develop a world like this? As we have discussed already, people gain more sexual arousal from humans/characters to whom they feel an emotional connection—thus, when a TV show has a large fan base, a portion of that fan base is sure to sexualize them (the Omegaverse originally gained traction among the fans of TV shows, specifically starting among fans of the show Supernatural).

This alternate reality allowed for the creation of erotic art that more perfectly fit the proclivities of a previously underserved audience. By creating a society in which typical gender roles are recontextualized as an inevitability from birth and divorced from gender, authors dabbling in this genre allow those who are turned off by the physicality of either males or females—but turned on by that gender’s “traditional gender role”—to easily get aroused. It also allows for individuals who have complicated feelings about male-female sexual interaction due to past experiences—who nevertheless, at a biological level, are still aroused by gender roles and impregnation—to receive arousal without as much complication. The Omegaverse accomplishes all this while also providing an avenue for those who are turned on by traditional gender roles—but who nevertheless see them as antiquated and offensive—to extract arousal from these gendered scenarios with less guilt, making it a perfect example of how socialization can influence our choice in erotic material and partners even if it does not affect our underlying arousal patterns.

While arousal from non-consensual sex is shockingly common (see page 404) our society tells us in no uncertain terms that people should feel bad about themselves if they find it arousing. Genres of erotic material like A/B/O create alternate social structures so arousal can be harvested from scenarios in which a dominant individual forces themselves on a submissive individual with dubious consent. In the case of A/B/O, this kind of action is presented as an inevitability and a biological imperative that allows the reader to luxuriate in the fantasy with fewer niggling ethical concerns spoiling the fun. This can be seen in tropes like a scent “compelling” an individual to have sex or in the “f**k or die” trope, in which an individual has to have sex with a particular person or they die (this scenario is often used in an attempt to lessen culpability associated with pressuring another person into sex). In this way, we see that genres of erotic material are often not only designed to fulfill arousal patterns, but also to circumvent socialized self-images that make fulfilling those arousal pathways difficult.

Elements of A/B/O draw in a colorful variety of readers—not just those aroused by “traditional” gender roles and instances of dubious consent in which a dominant partner pressures a submissive partner into sex. The Omegaverse tempts some readers in with its more animalistic flourishes (like the manner in which Alphas bite Omegas to mark them), others with Alphas’ bukkake-like sperm production, and others by Omegas’ inability to stop having sex once they start (implied by overpowering pheromonal rushes driving them into Alphas’ arms—and the knotting of Alpha penises). How cool it is to see this confluence of societal conditioning and arousal patterns coming together to create such a wild alternate universe—and better yet, one that has transcended its original purpose as erotic art in a manner that now helps people explore the various aspects of gender roles and their effects on society through speculative fiction.

The Omegaverse beautifully demonstrates that arousal can be thought of as existing on four levels:

Sex, Masturbation, Orgasms, & the Brain

Let’s take a look at how arousal, sex, and masturbation affect the brain and mental health. We will also take this opportunity to explore related topics, such as how intelligence affects one’s experience with sex.

The Effects of Sex on the Brain

There is a reason why characters are commonly depicted as becoming embarrassingly dumbstruck when they cross paths with someone they find to be sexually interesting. This maddening loss of mental faculties and grace really happens and is scientifically measurable.

Studies have found, again and again, that people undertake riskier behavior when sexually aroused. Worse, people are terrible at judging just how much they will concede when they are aroused and the extent to which arousal impairs their decision-making ability. A lapse in cognitive power when aroused can lead to more extreme types of BDSM, which are uniquely dangerous without upfront negotiations, limits, and continued check-ins. Safe words do not matter when your brain has turned into Jell-O.

Multiple experiments have shown that men experience cognitive impairment before and after interacting with women—even if said woman is a relative stranger, a woman who allegedly is looking at them through a two-way mirror, a woman with whom they interacted over a phone call, or even a woman who does not exist, but with whom men are told they will interact shortly.

This effect is not observed in women interacting with men. It is hypothesized that this may be a product of men being highly attuned to their behavior around potential mating opportunities. This may also be a product of men attempting to suppress themselves, as similar results are observed when a racist person speaks with someone of the race against which they are biased and when someone is afraid that a wealthier peer is watching them.

Sex also makes men very sleepy afterward, due to its effects on the prefrontal cortex combined with the release of oxytocin and serotonin. This effect, as well, is not seen in women.

Sometimes sex can just make one forget everything through an effect called “global transient amnesia,” which happens to seven out of every 100,000 people annually. Global transient amnesia only lasts for a short time (minutes or hours) and can be caused by vigorous sex (among a few other things). On the plus side, those suffering from transient amnesia after sex are genuinely able to say: “She/he f**ked my brains out.”

Not all effects of sex on the brain are negative. Women who have sex without a condom show fewer depressive symptoms than those who are not having sex or are having sex with a condom. Scientists theorize that some of the compounds in semen have antidepressant properties.

In both men and women, sex has been shown to relieve pain, fixing 60% of migraines and 30% of cluster headaches. In women, g spot stimulation is shown to elevate one’s pain threshold. Studies have also shown sex to make both males and females happier and leave one feeling as though life is more meaningful the following day. (Note: the g spot is not a real anatomical feature, but rather the location where the internal part of the clitoris, urethra, and vagina all intersect.)

Sex may even improve intelligence and reduce stress according to some research. When contrasted with rats who are allowed to have a one-night stand, rats that engaged in chronic sex—sex for 14 consecutive days—grew more neurons in the hippocampus, which is associated with memory. We also see, among rats, a correlation between frequency of sex and decreased stress plus lowered blood pressure.

An increase in hippocampus neurons due to frequent sex has yet to be shown in humans; however, humans do show lower blood pressure and decreased stress with more frequent sex. For those wondering what counts as frequent sex: Sex every third day is generally what is recommended to maximize its positive effects.

The Effects of Intelligence on Sex

We would be remiss to explore how sex affects the brain without investigating, briefly, how intelligence affects sex. As it happens, smarter people cheat more, and the correlation between intelligence and cheating is much stronger in women than men. Even after controlling for education, income, social class, race, age, current marital status, number of children, religion, and religiosity, intelligent people cheat more. This finding becomes more interesting the deeper one digs. While intelligence is positively correlated with infidelity, educational achievement is negatively correlated with infidelity.

Perhaps intelligent women with lower formal educational attainment are more likely to cheat because their natural abilities warrant better partners than society would otherwise facilitate. A high-value man may enjoy an intelligent woman’s company long enough for sex but may be too embarrassed to be in a long-term relationship with someone lacking a fancy education.

One can safely drop the assumption that smart people are disinterested in sex and that sexual desire is reserved for the knuckle draggers. Intelligence is, perhaps surprisingly, correlated with a higher libido. Counterintuitively, however, intelligence is also associated with less actual sex (even if more of that sex comes from cheating). It seems, then, that intelligent people want sex, but have the good sense and self-discipline to invest their time in other pursuits.

Finally, research in this area suggests that there is a point at which being smarter begins to hurt one’s sexual prospects. Specifically, the attractiveness-intelligence correlation peaks at around the 90th percentile, with the most desirable IQ to have being around 120.

Masturbation

Being familiar with communities like NoFap (a large online community that champions abstinence from masturbating) and popular books claiming to make unbiased, evidence-based approaches to the subject, we assumed there must be surprising evidence touting the harmful effects of masturbation—not that it will make one go blind or anything, but that it generally contributes to lower motivation, correlates with more problems in relationships, is highly associated with lower happiness, impairs cognitive function, or at least that it causes people to seek out crazier types of porn that desensitize them to “normal” sex. In reviewing the scientific literature on masturbation to find research supporting what we had been led to believe was true—that there is voluminous, peer-reviewed evidence demonstrating that masturbation has negative effects that can be mollified through abstinence from masturbation—we found that almost all of the scientific literature strongly disagreed with our assumption.

The Pragmatist Foundation’s highest goal is to help people become more comfortable changing their minds when the evidence does not align with their current beliefs about the world. We would be filthy hypocrites were we to dig around for the studies that reinforce our pre-existing beliefs, which we could totally do. We could easily cherry pick studies that support the argument that masturbation hurts relationships, especially if we cherry pick studies that do not account for the chicken and egg problem (that an already bad relationship will feature more masturbation on average). All that said, the weight of the evidence is clearly against masturbation being harmful to relationships, so we will not argue weak points. It is a good day when we will fall asleep being less wrong about the world than we were when we first got out of bed that morning.

It terms of health benefits, masturbation has been shown to improve sleep quality, lower the probability of prostate cancer, relieve menstrual cramps, reduce the risk of urinary tract infections, relieve muscle tension, improve the immune system through boosted leukocyte production, strengthen muscle tone in pelvic/anal areas, and increase sperm count.

With regard to benefits to one’s mental state, masturbation has been shown to release sexual tension, reduce stress, improve self-esteem, improve body image, and lead to higher self-reported rates of happiness. (Some studies suggested this was not the case in adolescent women, but later longitudinal studies suggested this finding was due to confounding factors.)

Masturbation may contribute to a decline in many social ills. UCLA researchers found that sex criminals, on average, consume less porn than the average person, and started consuming it at a later age than the average non-sex-criminal. Had today’s sex criminals been able to explore their sexuality through their imagination earlier, perhaps they would not have felt compelled to commit sex crimes later.

For every 10% increase in internet access in the US, there is a corresponding regional decrease of 7.3% in rapes, suggesting that the internet and its facilitation of masturbation may provide an outlet for sexual energy that might otherwise cause serious damage.

Across nations, more permissive attitudes toward pornography are correlated with lower rates of rape and less violence against women. A great case study of this can be seen with the Czech Republic, where porn was illegal under communism, then legalized when the party fell. This decriminalization of pornography caused, in one year, rapes to decline over 37% and child sexual abuse by about 50%. Similar results were seen when porn laws were loosened in Denmark, Japan, China, and Hong Kong.

Other studies reinforce these results, such as one in Aggression and Violent Behavior[[46]](#_ftn46) that found a (weak) inverse correlation between porn consumption and violent behavior toward women (specifically rape and sexual assault). The study’s findings suggest that the more porn a man consumes, the less likely he is to commit these violent acts against women.

Despite what we had assumed, masturbation and porn consumption do not lead people to think less of women. People who watch pornography hold views of women as more equal to men than those who do not watch pornography. Consumers of porn are no less likely to describe themselves as feminists and actually express more egalitarian ideas about both women in positions of power and working outside the home, according to the results of a study published in the Journal of Sex Research.[[47]](#_ftn47) (We did, however, find a study showing that men who were low on the trait of agreeableness did increase already sexist attitudes when exposed to pornography.[[48]](#_ftn48))

We did recall reading about a study conducted by the Max Planck Institute showing that intense porn consumption in men was associated with lower grey matter volume in the brain, so we went back to the study only to realize what it actually found was that men who consumed lots of porn had lower amounts of grey matter in a specific part of the brain: The right striatum. This is a part of the brain involved in reward processing. All the study says is that men who have deficient reward processing pathways consume more porn. The finding is not at all surprising and sounds more like correlation than causation. And wouldn’t you know it, that is what the authors of the study have also said in interviews.

At least masturbation itself must negatively affect one’s virility, ability to get laid, or relationships . . . Right?

Wrong.

A study conducted on college students found that those who masturbate more actually have more sex than those who masturbate less. Another study found that people who masturbate more often have happier marriages and more satisfying sex within those marriages. Masturbating while fantasizing about one’s partner has also been shown to improve the quality of relationships and reduce relationship-damaging behavior patterns.

Studies even show that the concept of building up a tolerance to vanilla porn (suggesting that that is why some people go to increasingly weird porn) is false—and this is something we were formerly certain was true, so we are quite excited to learn that we were wrong. Specifically, people who like weird porn still get turned on by vanilla porn and at even higher levels than people who prefer vanilla porn (statistically speaking, of course; this isn’t true for every single individual). Essentially, escalating weirdness in porn tastes may be the product of a higher affinity for porn in general. The underlying arousal patterns experienced by weird porn aficionados don’t shift in response to exposure to weird porn; they are merely able to tolerate more obscure content.

We do not start to see any consistent negative effects of masturbation and porn consumption until we get to studies looking at masturbation three or more times a day, and even those seem a little cherry picked. One study found that pornography negatively affects working memory, though the effect only holds while one is watching it (Thanks, Captain Obvious—we will be sure to remember that the next time we decide to take a test while masturbating). We also found some studies showing that when a woman knows her boyfriend is masturbating, it can hurt her body image, and some studies indicate that poor masturbation technique in men (gripping too hard) can lower a man’s sensitivity. Still, none of this really seems to paint even fairly frequent masturbation as being bad on the whole.

OK, OK, OK . . . But what about addiction? Masturbation addiction is destroying the lives of millions of young Americans, right? The answer here is a resounding: “Ehhh . . . anecdotally?” Masturbation is not recognized as addictive by the American Psychological Association (APA) and is not categorized as a mental health condition in the latest Standard Diagnostic Manual (DSM-5). We readily admit it seems a little weird that there isn’t much research showing masturbation can be addictive, as it seems to affect opioid pathways—and most things that affect opioid pathways enhance one’s ability to learn a behavior and thus cause addiction in a subset of the population. Think: Gambling, alcohol, morphine, etc.[[49]](#_ftn49)

Instead of being thought of as an addiction, the current consensus seems to be that frequent masturbation should be categorized as a compulsion—this is the same categorization given to what is colloquially called a “sex addiction.” In this case, there doesn’t seem to be anything (neurologically speaking at least) that differentiates someone who has an “addiction” to masturbation versus sex (meaning negative effects resulting from masturbating too much would also arise after too much sex). Even then, calling masturbation an addiction seems tenuous. For more on this, read The Myth of Sex Addiction by David Ley, Ph.D.

One study suggests that abstaining from masturbation for seven days may increase testosterone levels, which could be useful if a person is trying to build muscle. The problem here is that another, older study suggested that abstaining from masturbation reduces testosterone levels, and yet another study’s findings imply that while abstinence from masturbation appears to raise testosterone levels, the effects are trivially small. There is also some evidence supporting claims that frequent masturbation may cause a person’s number of androgen receptors to decrease and estrogen receptors to increase, but the evidence is tenuous.

For the belief that masturbation is negative in some way, there is a shining ray of hope: In males, and only in males, the use of pornography as a masturbation tool has been shown to have slight negative effects on relationships. Some neuroimaging studies show it may affect the male brain in negative ways as well (though both of these studies present fairly unique findings that are not, to our knowledge, broadly replicated).

We could find no studies showing additional positive effects (in men) from masturbating while looking at porn. To put it in other words, all of the even remotely negative side effects from masturbation are tied to pornography (aside from penile death grips). Thus, if you believe that masturbation is negatively affecting you, consider abstaining from porn as a masturbatory tool before you put in the effort to abstain from masturbating entirely.

This is a stretch, but masturbation among at least some monkeys is associated with a lack of dominance. Could frequent masturbation increase submissive arousal pathways? Perhaps, but . . . again, this is a stretch. It could just as easily be that already submissive monkeys turn to masturbation because other, more dominant males are getting all the actual sex, leaving these submissive apes fewer outlets for their sexual needs.[[50]](#_ftn50)

We bring up these points only if you absolutely must find something negative about masturbation. The reality is, even in the case of porn usage for masturbation, the majority of the available evidence suggests it is no big deal, and any negative effects emanate from something else. When a meta-study was done on the topic, it found no correlation between masturbation with porn and negative effects in most people, though it did find a very large effect tied to a masturbating individual’s moral opinion of porn. Specifically, if someone has a moral conflict with the idea of pornography yet uses pornography anyway, they will experience stress, anxiety, depression, diminished sexual well-being, and an increased risk of suicide, as well as religious and spiritual struggles.

Those who consume porn despite moral objections to it will also complain of more anguish in their attempts to control their porn use and believe that they are consuming more porn than their peers, regardless of how often they actually masturbate to porn. It appears to be that the negative psychological effects that other studies are finding are actually tied to a small subset of the population that views porn as morally corrupting and has tainted larger data pools.

Studies have shown people who experienced early life stressors and high religiosity may be more likely to exhibit sexually compulsive behaviors. One study found that:

“States with more Evangelical Protestants, theists (people who profess belief in a God or higher power), and biblical literalists (those who report they interpret the Bible as the literal word of God) are significantly more likely to have higher aggregate rates of online searches for pornography. States where people attend religious services more frequently are also significantly more likely to have higher rates of searches for online porn. Finally, we find that states with higher percentages of residents unaffiliated with any religious group have significantly lower levels of searching for online porn. These findings are interesting because at the individual-level, people who affiliate with Evangelical Protestant groups, attend church, read the Bible literally, or believe in God generally report much lower levels of pornography consumption.”[[51]](#_ftn51)

Ultimately, while it feels like masturbation and porn consumption should have various negative effects and we have very convincing anecdotes from individuals who claim that abstinence from these things has improved their lives, the current evidence doesn’t seem to support our intuition.

Where do we, Simone and Malcolm, stand at the end of all this?

**We now lean toward believing that porn consumption and masturbation themselves likely cause no real negative effects, but that porn and masturbation abstinence strengthens the inhibitory pathways in the brain—as does any form of abstinence that entails shutting down a reward pathway.** Strengthening inhibitory pathways in the brain makes it easier to deal with issues like procrastination, focus, and anxiety, but such strengthening could be executed just as easily by abstaining from sugar, regularly fasting, or not using Facebook.

What we suspect is that no fappers aren’t seeing benefits from removing porn specifically, but rather the benefits associated with repeatedly shutting down a reward pathway. It’s a bit like someone arguing that lying on couches for four hours of the day is unhealthy after beginning to spend two hours a day at the gym and subsequently feeling better in all sorts of ways. Someone in such a scenario is absolutely experiencing a quality-of-life improvement, but that improvement is coming more from the exercise than a sudden reduction in couch time in their lives.

Notes from the Research:

Notes from Our Research:

While the survey we personally conducted doesn’t paint a clear narrative about masturbation, we still find some of its results worth sharing:

In women:

In men, things are a bit more interesting:

Female Orgasms

Most books on sexuality feature, out of either tradition or a sense of obligation, a token section in which they explain that a quarter of women almost never orgasm during penetrative sex and that 3% of men almost never orgasm during sex. We do not find this to be a very interesting point. If you are not having sex to get pregnant, you are either doing it to harvest a certain subset of emotions (or utilize those emotions to exercise some control over another person) and orgasms make up just one small subset of those emotions (not to mention the one that is easiest to achieve without involving another person).

Sex can be great without an orgasm and sex can be terrible with an orgasm. Those bragging about the number times they made a partner climax during sex are really only communicating that (1) they know next to nothing about sex, and (2) that sex with this person is likely a chore. Someone who thinks sex is all about an orgasm is akin to a self-proclaimed foodie who only thinks something tastes good if there is loads of sugar in it.

Notes from the Research:

The Mechanics of Love

We would feel incomplete discussing arousal and sexuality in the absence of love. After all, many people insist, causing us to cringe instinctually, that they do not have sex with others but rather “make love.” What is this . . . Love? How does it work, and what is its place within the larger landscape of sexuality?

Arousal is a reward our brain serves when it detects certain sets of environmental stimuli. Generally speaking, we find things arousing because historically, the humans who experienced arousal upon detecting certain things in their environment—be they boobs or a submission ritual—had more surviving children. The human arousal system sometimes does not function as intended; some are aroused when exposed to breasts so comically large, they would kill a woman; others are aroused when looking at half-humans, half-animals with whom they could not possibly breed.

Generally speaking, love exists for the same reason (because those who felt it had more surviving offspring) and suffers from similar problems. Love is a neurological system that scans the environment for certain stimuli and, when it senses specific sets of stimuli, creates a feeling/impulse. The impulses associated with love feel different from those associated with arousal, are triggered by different environmental cues, trigger different sets of reactions, and linger much longer. Just as each individual has their own unique pattern of arousal reactions that culminate in their “sexuality,” each person also features a unique pattern of love reactions, which can be thought of as their “amourality.” We use the term amourality instead of romantic orientation, as romantic orientation is a combination of amourality, societal concepts of romance, and NRE[[52]](#_ftn52) orientation (how you crush)—but more on all that shortly.

The arousal impulse appears to have blossomed from reward mechanisms originally only meant to encourage our ancestors to have sex with things. Sexual arousal later became hijacked by other pathways, such as dominance-submission pathways, as humans developed into a more complicated social species.

In a similar vein, our pre-social distant ancestors likely first evolved the emotion of love because it encouraged them to differentially protect their offspring over other members of the species. Only later did early humans begin applying this emotion to adult, pair-bonded partners and later still apply it to non-romantic partners as a method of promoting social cohesion.

Why was love, this child protection system, favored by evolution over other emotional pathways to promote long-term pair bonding and tribal social cohesion? Why do we feel the emotional bundle we associate with love instead of generic joy, contentment, or satisfaction? Why did humans not develop a new, unique emotion for pair-bonded partners instead of using the same pathway we use to bond to our children? Simply put, this emotional set already existed, and it’s evolutionarily cheaper to hijack an existing emotional set than it is to build a new system. Additionally, love is nearly perfect in its functionality and features as a tool for motivating behaviors that would facilitate productive and collaborative behavior among groups of humans.

What are the functions and features that make love so perfect as a tool to motivate pair-bonded relationships and social cohesion? Not only does love last much longer than other positive emotions, but it also has the ability to identify and apply unique emotional reactions to specific individuals—something obviously important for identifying and reacting differentially to one’s own children, but also very useful in a pair-bonded partnership or among a group of close friends.

Love generates a higher level of empathy with its targets, causing humans to experience more happiness when the subjects of their love thrive—and generating more sadness when loved ones suffer. Love seems inextricably paired with a desire to protect that which is loved from harm. Love doesn’t latch onto people per se, but rather our internal concepts of those we love, enabling the formation of love for anthropomorphized concepts that are not “people” (such as “my tribe,” “my team,” or “the human race”).

Before we move forward we must differentiate the “love” emotional set and “romance” emotional set. Romance is a confluence of two additional impulses to love that can be conflated into a single “romantic identity:”

  1. The desire to fulfill society’s expectation of romantic actions (candle-lit dinners, flowers, and the like)
  2. NRE (new relationship energy)

NRE creates a much stronger and more acute emotional state than love (at average levels, in their most extreme states love is a more intense emotion). NRE is often perceived as a “crush” or “squish.”[[53]](#_ftn53) Unlike love alone, this emotional state causes an intense fixation on the target, a desire to spend time around them, have a closer relationship (whether that be platonic or romantic), and sometimes to be more like them.

NRE typically decreases as you get to know an individual better (which is why it lasts longer in long-distance relationships), while love typically increases as you get to know an individual better (in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, we explore NRE in intense detail, as NRE addiction has the same neurological effects as addiction to codeine, can cause catastrophic consequences, and is an ever-present threat when first entering the poly community). If you are having trouble imagining the difference in these two emotional sets: Love in absence of NRE is what you feel for your dog or country, while NRE in absence of love is what you feel for your middle school crush.

Perhaps love and NRE are so difficult to parse out because first-time romances tend to be glorified. People first feel NRE around middle school and, due to its novelty and intensity, they may mistake it for the emotion of love all the adults are talking about—rather than realizing love was that boring emotion they had always felt for their siblings, parent, or pet.

While society talks about “flavors” of love, it really seems as though the different types of love are determined by output levels and the social acceptability of different beloved subjects. While it is seen as socially positive if a mother exhibits behaviors associated with extreme love for her kids, it would be seen as creepy if someone were to exhibit the same behavioral sets for a boyfriend of two weeks or a sports team. People would be hesitant to identify the impulses driving the latter actions as “love” and instead use the word “obsession”—even if the impulses could be shown to be functionally identical at a neurological level—because society seems to have a fundamental discomfort with the idea that love can drive gauche actions.

Our brains are great at convincing us the same “flavor” of emotion is a few different things as long as we have a social scheme that supports the differentiation. For example, Skittles (the candies) are actually all the same flavor, but many people believe they are tasting unique flavors because we have been socially conditioned to associate certain colors with certain flavors.

Think of “love output” as being like a faucet. Different things will turn the knob on the top of that faucet. The level of love output that society condones varies depending on the factors turning the knob. Society supports a medium-high level of love if it is triggered by one’s children or spouse, a medium level for friends and family, and a light level for one’s country, humanity in general, etc.

The mere presence of societal ideals for the level of love one should feel toward various things does not ensure everyone’s brains generate love outputs following those guidelines. There is a huge diversity in the amourality of individuals. Some experience greater love for things like friends or abstract concepts like sports teams than they do for romantic partners.

At higher levels of output, love is not always a pleasant emotion to experience. Historically speaking, love—especially romantic love—was seen with the same negative prudishness as sexual arousal. In the majority of historic cultures, forming a love pair bond with an adult of another gender to whom one was not married (and even in some cases showing love for a spouse) was seen as a moral failing.

Love among romantic partners was not really put on a pedestal until the 13th-century arrival of the chivalric literature movement, exemplified by cringy erotic romance novels that feature comic book-like adventures. Celebration of love among romantic partners did not really affect society as a whole until the descendants of the chivalric movement began to influence other forms of media. The idea that love is an indication of who you should want to marry did not even really begin to capture the general public’s imagination until the time of Disney. People’s belief that love is the key to a stable, long-term romantic relationship, rather than just an emergent property of many long-term relationships, is a very recent invention and cultural export of industrialized Western civilization (we discuss how this concept emerged from chivalric literature and the courtly love movement in greater detail in the chapter: “Conclusion: Relationships, Sex, & Society” on page 368).

Even more recent is the moral elevation of love for concepts like “humanity” and “one’s fellow man.” This cultural shift metastasized during the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, perhaps in part due to a higher output from “love systems” in the brain induced by certain drugs that were popular at the time.[[54]](#_ftn54) Many today bizarrely associate the concept of “free love” with the idea that one should have sex without inhibition instead of the ideas that one should learn to experience love for everything, that love is always good, and that love should be given away for “free”—which are ultimately closer to the actual message of the free love movement. We view the concept that love is never bad as more radical and socially corrosive than the idea that one should have sex without inhibition, so perhaps it is best that people inaccurately remember what the term meant.

Anyone who has experienced a full torrent of the “love output” would be loath to idealize the emotion and understand it for the danger it poses. They would understand the way it eats at the edges of one’s consciousness with a yandere haze, constricting one’s perspective of reality through a single point that blazes like magnesium.

Studies show love’s effect on the brain to be similar to that of heroin. How is that a good thing? When our brains are unafflicted, they generally gain happiness from being nice to people and making the world a better place. In contrast, a torrent of love can allow us to gain satisfaction from burning a civilization to the ground were we to believe that doing so would please or protect the objects of our affection. We are fairly sure we are not the only ones who have experienced love in this way—we see people talk this way about their kids, their pets, and even their home countries with similar awe and horror. An interviewer once insisted to us that love would never lead to an “evil” impulse. We asked her if she would kill an innocent person to protect her children, and if so, what emotional state would motivate that impulse. She changed the subject.

Seeing as love is not necessarily an emotion above moral reproach, but rather just an occasionally misfiring impulse we evolved, let’s explore the triggers for love and how they break.

Note from our Survey:

Love for Our Children

Love originally evolved to help proto-humans identify their offspring and treat them differentially when contrasted with other young members of their species (this would boost the odds that one’s genes proliferate). Most mammals likely feel something similar to what we experience as “love” toward their offspring. Some young mammals also feel a sort of love for their parents; this love is triggered by different factors than those which make parents love their children. Here we will explore the systems that inspire adults to love individuals they believe to be their children as well as the systems that compel children to love individuals they believe to be their parents.

In Adults

Adults form a love attraction to a child when they encounter the following stimuli:

These systems are the least interesting of the love systems in that they “break” the least, which makes sense due to their evolutionary importance. The only two interesting takeaways here are that:

  1. Men feature fewer triggers for loving children than women do, meaning they likely experience less love for their children on average. Even we find this a bit offensive, as it sucks to say that fathers will not love their children as much as mothers will (on average), but the studies back it up. Men simply love their children less than women do—again, on average. In a Pew Survey, 98% of women saw their children as their primary source of happiness, whereas male respondents often ranked children below other things, such as their careers.
  2. Our pets have hijacked aspects of this system by evolving to maintain childlike characteristics longer in life and emphasizing these child-like features more, eliciting a “cute endearment” reaction. Species that have co-evolved longest with humans, such as cats, even meow at a frequency similar to that reached by a child. Some animals coincidently activate these systems. Killer whales have large black spots that our brains interpret as oversized eyes and lead us to see them as endearing instead of bloodthirsty murder junkies and psycho rapists (honestly, nothing under the water is more representative of the horror of the natural world more than Orcas, but they have big eye spots and sharks have “lifeless beady eyes,” so we see one as cute and the other evil).

We would also argue that the elements of love that cause attachment to pets may actually be evolving into their own unique set of triggers and reactions within human brains. Consider how long we have lived alongside our closest companions—dogs and cats—and how much we have likely manipulated their love systems to pair bond to us. Humans have selectively bred dogs to pair bond to their masters for generations to the extent that the torrent of “love” output a dog feels when it interacts with his human is likely a thousand times stronger than any output of love a human is capable of experiencing due to the strong selective pressures placed on domesticated dogs, which exaggerates that emotional output. A dog’s love system related to humans is arguably more important to the survival of its offspring than the dog’s own attraction systems to fellow dogs. To put it another way, no one—be they a parent, boyfriend, or wife—will ever love a human as much as that human’s dog does, as our ancestors genetically manipulated that dog to force it to love you.

Babies & Love

What causes babies to experience love?

The system causing babies to experience love is fascinating because it breaks in a cool way, a lot of research has been done on it, and it is fairly straightforward.

A baby will feel love toward a thing if:

  1. It is soft
  2. It is warm
  3. It is familiar / often present
  4. Certain pheromone-based systems are triggered

Ape babies given a choice between a soft warm cloth mother that did not produce milk and a wireframe mother that did produce milk vastly preferred the cloth mother over her cold-but-nourishing rival. Surely the human system is more complicated, right? We don’t think so.

Consider teddy bears and “blankies” (small blankets to which children form a strong emotional attachment). Researchers call these things “comfort items.” These comfort items are not terribly different from the cloth mother presented by researchers to ape infants—they are warm, soft, and familiar—and seeing as they provide no benefit to a child’s survival, they can be seen somewhat as the porn equivalent for infants.

Comfort items hint at the age at which this particular love system “shuts off” in humans—around the age of four. This is the last age during which a developmentally normal child can form an attachment to a new comfort item.

Comfort items exemplify how subjects to which humans form attachments through a love system that subsequently subsides can persist as significant objects of affection well into adulthood. One in three adults report being unable to throw away a childhood comfort item. While this love system, when functioning normally, will not lead us to fall in love with something after the age of four, the subjects to which babies and toddlers bond through this love system can remain subjects of our affection well into adulthood.

Takeaways:

  1. If you want to afflict your child with love for you, hold them a lot before they are four years old and let them see you as a soft source of warmth.
  2. A child is very likely to form a similar “love” attraction to pets, siblings, and caregivers.
  3. We imagine this system breaks sometimes and stays active in adults; however, we have yet to hear or read of this phenomenon arising. We would assume when it does happen, it gets mistaken as a kink or a weird obsession with stuffed animals or body pillows.
  4. Because these systems are most active in youth, we associate common comfort items (such as blankets and stuffed animals) with youth. Some women subconsciously attempt to use this association to appear younger and thus more fertile by associating themselves with lots of teddy bears and stuffed animals (if you haven’t run into one of these women yet, trust us; they exist). When you consider that these systems are supposed to turn off at age four, this is a somewhat disturbing strategy.

Love for Our Social Groups

Love for one’s tribe likely piggybacks on the love-related systems we evolved to identify and care for our offspring. Human ancestors born with mutations that enabled them to form love for their tribes (albeit weaker love than that felt for offspring) likely survived at higher rates.

This phenomenon of love for one’s tribe or pack is not exclusive to humans. The system that causes a chubby 40-year-old man to miss work to catch his team’s game is the same system that causes wild dogs to risk their lives to protect the pack.

The tribal love system seems to work along the following pathway:

  1. Determine a group of individuals with a unique identity (even better if said group is in competition with other groups)
  2. Gauge membership in this group
  3. If deemed to be a member, come to personally, deeply identify with this group
  4. Experience satisfaction when this group wins and anguish when the group loses, thereby strengthening the bond—especially if these empathetic feelings are experienced with other group members in a communal setting (more specifically, we think that skinner box conditioning associated with wins and losses is needed for this step)

This system does not appear to require in-person interaction with a group in order to activate and begin generating strong feelings of love and attachment. These emotional responses include a desire to protect the group, make it happy, and see it “win,” albeit at much lower levels than similar desires elicited by love for children or a pair-bonded partner.

This system’s lower volume settings may make it seem deceptively safer as a love system than the others. In actuality, social group love is the most dangerous love system of all. Media—social and otherwise—has found a way to hijack this pathway, leveraging it to create an attachment to a political ideology and use this attachment to force audience engagement.

This low level of the “love” output experienced by a large portion of the population toward one political party or another makes it very difficult for that group to critically evaluate their party’s beliefs as they change over time. Our social love systems have many people clinging to certain groups even after they cease to exemplify their values. The same systems that lead us to form strong personal attachments to sports teams and illogically hate people who see themselves as supporting the other team generate a similar but far more harmful air of animosity on the political landscape. Worse still, this attachment is profitable to media companies and useful within the political system for getting votes, so there is no motivation for an outside pressure to reverse this escalation.

If you’re thinking this “love system” couldn’t get worse, consider how tribal love engenders hatred toward those deemed traitorous. All love systems seem to do this to some extent—consider how mad people get at partners they love(d) who they feel betrayed them through cheating on them or leaving. Hatred toward perceived traitors makes extra sense within tribal-based love systems, seeing as traitorous behavior has the potential to deal a fatal blow to tribal integrity.

This reaction hampers societal and political progress when “tribe members” come to hate fellow group members who allow their beliefs to evolve when presented with new information (seeing as they may now refuse to tow the party line). If a member of a political group updates their perspective on an issue when confronted with evidence, but the rest of the group does not, then they will often be more hated by the group than a member of another political faction. For obvious reasons, this does not serve society well.

Love for Romantic Partners and Concepts

Love systems tied to romance clearly have the most relevance in an exploration of sexuality, as sexual attachment and romantic attachment are often conflated. Our romantic love systems are fascinating because they are worse than even some other love systems at targeting humans rather than concepts.

The romantic love system is not magical and can be “tricked.” More than twenty years ago, psychologist Arthur Aron famously tried to manufacture love in a laboratory setting. Participants from the experiment not only fell in love, but they ended up getting married. Aron demonstrated both that love can be created just by exposing people to a specific set of stimuli and that social pressures to marry who you love are so strong, people will end up marrying someone just because they love them—even when they consciously know the love they experience was created under laboratory conditions.

Romantic love appears to be triggered by:

Through understanding the above points, one can incite love in a target individual with an even higher fidelity than the method used by Arthur Aron. Specifically, the feeling of love can be reliably instigated in a subject by combining regular sex with a few sessions in which you:

This technique takes about a week and a half to strongly set in and is generally effective as long as the target feels comfortable enough to be vulnerable and talk about things they otherwise wouldn’t feel safe discussing. An adequate level of comfort, aesthetic appeal, and hygiene is also necessary—a target is not going to tolerate prolonged close proximity and eye contact with someone who has horrid breath and stinking hair, and a target will not be able to engage in deep philosophical conversation if they are tired, hungry, cold, and feeling threatened or trapped.

The above technique boasts an admirable success rate on people with little sexual experience. Explaining the steps and the purpose of the “experiment” to a target (which we would recommend, in the name of good form) does not appear to lower the probability of this method working. This method is not from any specific set of research findings, but rather a conglomeration of a few studies combined with personal experimentation. It works reliably enough that we assume there must be something behind it.

This technique revolves around three core elements:

  1. Maximizing feelings of vulnerability, backed up by feelings of safety
  2. Physiological modifiers like eye contact and sex
  3. Complex, cognitively engaging discussions that inspire self-reflection (read The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life if you don’t know how to have these)

Statistics on romantic love in arranged marriages strongly indicate that romantic love between people generally forms when they spend a lot of time around and rely on each other. We developed the process outlined above merely to see if romantic love could be developed more rapidly.

Our brains appear to use complexity—rather than actual closeness—as a proxy for the closeness of a relationship. Just as one might use weight as a proxy for volume to determine how much water is in a particular container (despite there being many other things could increase the weight of a container, such as rocks), our minds appear to use the apparent complexity of a person and the frequency with which we think about them as a proxy for our intimacy with that person.

It is an elegant system. Humans spend very little time thinking about or building models of people who are not romantic targets. We just don’t think about other people that much unless we are trying to get said people to mate with us. If someone is successful in their romantic conquest, they will spend more and more time around their romantic target, further increasing the complexity of their mental image of the person, so the complexity of our image of a person could prove as a valid proxy for success in a romantic conquest. This would in turn increase the evolutionary advantage of falling in love with such a person.

In short: Since those about whom we think the most are commonly those we romantically pursue, the complexity of our mental models of others serves as a great proxy for our subconscious to measure when determining who/what to love.

We have yet to find evidence that love has a gender detection system associated with it.[[55]](#_ftn55) Love appears to be completely focused on our concept of who a person is rather than any particular person as a physical entity.[[56]](#_ftn56) Despite anecdotal claims to the contrary, there is no statistical evidence for a “gay” or “straight” version of the amourality system.[[57]](#_ftn57) Outside of social pressures and a few extremely rare cases, most people appear to be panromantic and capable of forming love bonds with men, women, and even animals.[[58]](#_ftn58)

This makes intuitive sense when you think about it: How many people love their pets just as strongly as they love their spouses? We know plenty of people who would openly boast of feeling such love, and yet we would hardly think of them as practicing bestiality because intuitively most people have experience loving a vast array of things (from babies to cats). All that said, both having sex with someone or being sexually attracted to them seems to expedite the formation of pair bonds, so love will form more quickly with the genders one sexually prefers.

Our model would therefore hypothesize that “bromance” is the exact same emotion as romantic love—it is merely contextualized differently. Because romantic love bonds with those to whom one is not sexually attracted are not categorized as love bonds in Western culture, such relationships get mockingly categorized as “bromances.”

Here’s the real kicker: Because love targets our concepts of a person rather than the person themselves, it is possible to fall in love with a completely abstract concept. What, specifically, causes this phenomenon?[[59]](#_ftn59)

We systematically recalled moments in our lives during which we felt love toward non-human concepts and searched for similarities between those moments. Complexity or a conceptual vastness seeming just out of reach shone through in all such moments, which included:

We appear to develop feelings of love for something when it almost makes sense but remains just out of range for clear comprehension—when it feels like there is a level of complexity we grasp for split seconds but cannot hold.

A secondary theme also popped up in these memories: The concepts toward which we felt love elicited a sense of protection and comfort. This is why the concept of humanity alone does not generate love, while the concept of humanity + a comforting idea of oneness does. This is why the galaxy alone does not trigger love while the galaxy + a comfort with one’s place in it does.

We suspect others are subject to this same system but have not seen research on it, so we may just come off as crazy here.

Note from the Research:

Do All Three Love Systems Really Yield the Same Emotion?

Are we crazy to label romantic, tribal, and child/pet-facing love as “love?” Remember how we mentioned that all Skittles actually taste the same, but due to cultural norms around how certain colors are “supposed to taste,” many perceive them as tasting differently? We suspect something similar is happening with love.

Social convention makes it very clear that feelings of strong attachment toward a partner, friends, a political party, a sports team, and humanity are distinct. That said, other cultures often use different terms when discussing what our society categorizes as a singular “love” emotion. While we commonly use the word “love” when describing the feeling someone has for their spouse, children, God, and parents, other cultures may use four different words to describe the attachment one feels to each.

The words we use influence how we think about things and may go so far as to influence what we are actually feeling (consider that cultures with gendered language show more gender bias)[[60]](#_ftn60). Even if an emotion generated by meditating on the vastness of space would be called a different emotion than love, when one really focuses on that emotion and attempts to “grab it” and compare it to the emotion felt toward a spouse, one will notice a striking similarity.

Note that while the love pair bond can be created with three or four different sets of inputs, once it is in place, all “love bonds” yield very similar outputs:

We imagined that an experiment contrasting fMRI data related to political party devotees or sports team fanatics and people in love with a partner would show nearly the same reward pathways lighting up when those subjects are asked to think about said political parties, sports teams, and beloved partners, so we did some snooping and found one:

“Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love”by Acevedo et al. The study roughly confirms our hunch—or at least an assertion that romantic love and the love you have for friends show up the same in fMRI data. That said, the researchers observed that romantic love also features elements associated with NRE not seen in the other love pathways.

Behaviors Motivated by Love

Now that we’ve explored what makes us love various targets, let’s dive into what that love makes us do.

Some of the more obvious impulses inspired by love include:

We’ll double click on bragging, then expand on some less obvious behaviors that might be motivated by love.

Bragging About a Target of Love

We would argue the most bizarrely strong of the “love impulses”—given how surprising it can be when a person first feels it—is the desire to talk to uninterested parties about the target of one’s love. Feeling a strong urge to “shout one’s love from the rooftops” (or plaster it all over social media) appears cross-culturally; thus, we can only assume it is not socialized but instead an inborn instinct. We would suspect this bragging behavior alerts others in your social group that your partner is already committed to a pair-bonded relationship, which may help to reduce potential conflict. Nevertheless, this bragging behavior persists even when the target of one’s love is an abstract concept (like sports teams) or a child (even we cannot resist posting photos of our kid on Facebook).

One cool thing about the impulse to brag about one’s children to members of one’s social group is that you see it play out with many other mammals. Just look up videos of mammals like dogs and ferrets showing their new kids off to their owners. We even found a video of a rescued squirrel exhibiting this behavior, which mystifies us because adult squirrels are not social animals. We suppose this instinct comes from a social ancestor to the Grey Squirrel and is an evolutionary anachronism, but who knows?

Is Food-Making Behavior Motivated by Love?

Across cultures, we see phrases like: “The dish was made with love.” It is as if multiple cultures have come to the conclusion the very essence of love is believed to have been magically passed into the dish, which is subsequently consumed by the object of one’s affection. This is a somewhat logical conclusion if, across cultures, people felt an impulse to make these dishes under the influence of “love” and said impulse subsided as the dish was being made.

One interesting thing to note is that across cultures, the types of food one has an impulse to make fall roughly into three categories:

We doubt these specific meal types represent an inborn impulse and imagine they are more related to logical ways to construct a healthy meal, but we are amused by the way they repeat eerily across cultures.

Another interesting cross-cultural trend we observe is that women often cook day-to-day foods while males often cook in group settings or when expensive ingredients are being used. To be more specific, female cooking seems more often motivated by love of a specific individual, while male culinary action appears to be driven by group cohesion rituals, such as BBQs. You even see this in matrilineal cultures like the Minangkabau and matriarchal cultures like the Mosuo.

Counterexample: In the culture of the Tonga (one of the Polynesian cultures), men appear to have done most of the day-to-day cooking. That said, it also appears that most of the day to day cooking in this culture was part of a group cohesion ritual so . . . We are not sure what the takeaway should be.

We are not sure if this is some inborn difference in the way love is felt or just a common cultural pattern caused by men being more likely to have hunted meat due to their larger size and higher ease of building muscle mass due to having more testosterone.

Is the Way Love is Experienced Influenced by a Person’s Gender?

We can only provide conjecture because there isn’t good research on gender differences in the expression of love—all we could find was a lot of obviously biased stuff from the ’70s and ’80s tied to archaic theories like “the color wheel theory of love” that attempts to classify the pair-bonding emotion as a set of emotions based on whether it expresses itself in ways deemed socially healthy or not.

We did find one clear delineation in existing research data, but we believe it to be socialized, as we have not seen it remarked on in other cultures:

We tried to see if we could piece together anything ourselves by looking for studies of dating patterns and gendered work in a number of cultures, with special effort to include cultures in which women have more power than men or in which there are unique dating/marriage patterns. Then, we looked for any practices that all these cultures either shared or didn’t explicitly not share. However, these studies were never as exhaustive as we needed them to be to note anything other than the occasional common ritual. Worse, there were always complicating factors. For example, we found a tendency for men to go on long journeys to show love across cultures, but even if this aspect of love wasn’t felt more by men than women, women would be put at more risk (think: Rape) on a solo pilgrimage than a male, so cultures naturally would have tended to evolve this as a male-specific expression of love.

We also were usually able to find an exception when we thought there were no counterexamples to a practice. Consider the common role females take as the primary care provider to children: We found one counterexample to this in a small African tribe called the Aka. In this tribe of about 20,000 people, men spend a disproportionate amount of time with infants—even going so far as to breastfeed infants. However, despite some wishful reporting to the contrary, it appears this is mostly only something lower-status men in Aka society do. Also, the extent of this behavior may have been overreported because in the Aka tribe, male and female partners do most activities, such as hunting, together. Given that male involvement in infant care was “proven” by how often a male was within arm’s reach of a child, the above fact would complicate this.

We would love to see a cross-cultural study that looked to see if one gender disproportionately performed certain rituals for a romantic partner, but as things stand we would feel uncomfortable claiming that the expression of love is different between genders in all areas but one. Society is awash with the idea that love leads to sexual attraction in women and sexual attraction leads to love in men. Some research even claims to back this up, but we find it to be neither abundant nor terribly well-constructed. We think this notion is wrong and more a product of societal ideas about men and women, with the stereotype being that men are more driven by sex, whereas women are more driven by love.

We theorize that the opposite is likely true: That sex triggers the love emotion in women more than it does in men, and men are much more likely to develop a love attachment to an individual who has had no intimate (or even significant interpersonal) interaction with them. This would explain the higher portion of male stalkers who attribute their stalking behavior to love. Still, the claim that these processes, if accurate, mean expressions of love are gendered is kind of cheating, as the processes have more to do with the higher levels of oxytocin females produce during sex, which increases the speed of pair bonding with a partner and thus love.

You Don’t Love a Person

No human has ever loved another human, ever. A human can only love the idea of another human—the image one has of them in one’s mind. This image may or may not accurately represent the subject of one’s affection. Problems emerge when one’s image of the subject of their affection (often rather idealized) ultimately proves to be inaccurate. Plenty of people have fallen into deep states of denial, unable to see very apparent flaws in their loved ones or recognize discrepancies in the target’s behaviors. Such delusions can lead a stalker, for example, to not realize that their target does not even know them.

The Genetics of Love

Just as genes influence our libidos, our genes influence how we experience love. Specifically, the Oxytocin Receptor gene (OXTR) has been shown to be tied to marital stability by studies at Binghamton University. Essentially, different people appear to experience oxytocin (the chemical that causes the feeling of love) in different ways, which drives some individuals to be born feeling love more strongly than others. Differences in how OXTR across individuals likely lead to inborn differences influencing how long it takes to form a “love” attachment to others and how long these attachments last. At this point, most studies done on this gene have been really small (under one hundred participants), but we would be excited to see this field expand.

Leveraging Arousal for Fun & Profit

As we approach the end of the book’s core, let’s reflect on how knowledge of involuntary arousal systems can be leveraged for personal gain. Some people are dedicated to extracting as many positive emotions from their short lives as possible, while others choose to maximize some effect they hope to have on the world. Both groups can utilize knowledge of sexual arousal to their advantage. We will address each group in turn, providing tips on maximizing the desired outcome in each scenario.

Strip Mining Positive Emotional States

Setting up a strip mining operation to extract as much positive emotion from life as possible is not straightforward because things that arouse us rarely align with our self-images. A woman may get turned on when a man forcefully exerts dominance over her while simultaneously feeling horrible about not embodying characteristics she associates with being a strong, independent female leader. A husband may enjoy having sex with lots of novel women but feel horrible when doing so because he also loves his primary partner and knows his extramarital affairs hurt her emotionally. What’s a girl to do if she extracts happiness from seeing the love of her life happy, but the love of her life extracts pleasure through being hit and verbally humiliated? Our disgusting human brains certainly don’t make this easy on us.

Something that activates pleasure through one pathway, like arousal, may simultaneously activate an aversive emotion through another pathway—or put one in an unfavorable position (e.g., arousal from flashing strangers). Those lucky few with cliché self-images who are in a traditional relationship and whose arousal systems are 100% vanilla by our present society’s standards will experience almost no conflict in the output of these systems. The far-more-common masses who are statistically normal—but not in a societally vanilla way—will have to contend with the fact that their brains suck when it comes to strip mining happiness from life.

How can people “outsmart” their own systems for outputting positive emotional states?

First: Identify the things that provide positive emotions you cannot change (like arousal patterns and amourality patterns[[61]](#_ftn61)). Next: Alter the things that provide positive emotional states you can change (such as your internal self-image) to more easily extract positive emotions from the pathways that can’t be changed.

You will quickly notice that your ideal self-identity is the most malleable thing from which you derive positive emotional states. Admittedly, rewriting your entire self-identity just to optimize something like positive emotional states will come off as draconian to most. Fortunately, there is another option.

All humans have mental models of people they meet. Humans use these models to attempt to predict others’ behavior patterns (or generate another’s side of an argument when arguing with them in one’s head long after the real argument ended).

This same mental modeling system may be used to generate most of the emotions people feel. Essentially, each person’s brain has a mental model—think of it as a character sheet—that describes them to themselves. When subconsciously deciding how to react to any given situation, our brains refer to this mental model—this character sheet—and ask: “How would this character feel about X? How would they react?” before determining how to act and establishing which emotions to produce. The resulting output will be filtered and modulated by a few other factors, such as sleepiness, hunger, coldness, pain, etc., but the model being referenced is immensely influential. These systems look for environmental cues and almost always change when a person dramatically switches between environments. This is also why some studies found that individuals lost their heroin addictions at a rate of 95% when coming home from Vietnam—the environments and daily lives of ex-soldiers upon returning from war were different enough that many rewrote their internal character sheets and as a result, even their most basic impulses were changed (for more on this theory, read: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life).

Here is the trick: Humans do not maintain just one self-image that determines what emotional output they receive: They actually have several internal models that activate in different environments. The self-images our brains reference at school are usually different from those we reference at work, which in turn usually differ from the internal self-models we pull from when around family. This is why we often lapse into behavior patterns we have long since grown out of when home for the holidays and around family members. Heck, as humans, we can even create temporary self-images and pretty effectively adapt to them—this is, to a certain extent, the point of sexual roleplay.

People most commonly switch internal mental models when switching roles (i.e., from lawyer to mother, student to boyfriend, rockstar to daughter, etc.), clothing, activities, and environments. We are much like actors on stages, looking for cues from costumes and sets to determine who we are, what emotions we should be feeling, and how we should be acting.

You can leverage the fact that people have various internal mental models to create extra, intentionally made models that (1) can be activated by a certain setting, change of clothes, ritual, or other cue, and (2) reflect people whose emotional sets would be easy to maximize through the sexuality and amourality you happen to have.

People use this trick all the time. This is why BDSM communities often use very specific and elaborate signals for scenes. These signals make the internal model switch easier and prevent bleed over from other self-images. For example, people may perform an elaborate ritual in unusual clothing, in an unusual location, in which one partner puts a collar on another. Everything associated with the clothing, location, ritual, and interactions one has in this BDSM context is completely alien to anything one may encounter in one’s daily life, and yet they are internally consistent across BDSM contexts. One can live free of worry that they will accidentally walk into a dungeon at work or have to wear a collar to school; thus, there is no concern one will have other contexts activate/pollute one’s BDSM self-image.

The keys to executing on this strategy involve intentionally building an additional internal model as well as a ritual, environment, and outfit that facilitate activation of that model. This can be done in isolation with a partner or in a larger social context. The furry community, a subgroup of people who dress up like animals, exemplifies an excellent execution of this strategy: They create entirely new personalities called “fursonas” that can differentiate from their day-to-day persona in everything from disposition to gender, accent, and fictionalized life history.

Furries have an advantage over the BDSM community in that the identity one adopts within it differs so wildly from one’s day-to-day internal model there is no risk of bleed over. This yields less cognitive dissonance when one reflects on the actions in which one’s sexual identity indulges. For example, if one’s day-to-day internal model hates the idea of being degraded, it will not cause as much cognitive dissonance if, rather than one’s day-to-day self, a half-fox-half-dragon named Misty Sunrise gets degraded.[[62]](#_ftn62)

The one catch with this approach is that, even if one can inhabit a different personality in the moment, it can be very difficult to rationalize that personality’s actions afterward, upon returning to regularly scheduled programming. It is common for people to try out the kink scene only to leave after they realize how disgusted their predominant internal model is with the fact that they enjoyed something like rape play.

Using Sexual Arousal, Sexual Aversion, & Love to Increase Efficiency

While some people seek to maximize fulfillment, love, arousal, and other pleasurable emotional states, others select a specific value or metric to maximize in their lives, based on an analysis of the human condition through whatever lens (religious or secular) they choose. The manner in which people come to these sorts of conclusions is explored in depth in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life. Let’s focus on how we can manipulate arousal-adjacent systems to better achieve such goals.

The most useful of the pathways discussed in this book, when it comes to achieving such goals, are the dominance and submission pathways. While these pathways can generate arousal, they actually represent complicated pre-programmed mental states designed to inspire specific behavior patterns that don’t necessarily instigate arousal (it all depends on context).

Consider religious submission displays, such as kneeling, hand clasping (part of a middle ages hand-binding ritual), talk of lords and masters, self-flagellation, having to obey commands to abstain from certain foods/activities, and tefillin. These patterns do not instigate arousal in religious contexts, but they are clearly borrowing from some deep-seated mental systems that lead to the co-evolution of similar displays in BDSM dungeons.

While BDSM sometimes does steal paraphernalia and rituals from religions, a look into the historical origins of BDSM accessories and practices that resemble religious ephemera conclusively reveals that—outside of maybe self-flagellation—they were not borrowed from religious displays. Rather, eerily similar BDSM displays evolved completely independently to fulfill the same, deep subconscious needs of our submission systems. In other words, behavioral sets associated with the submission system appear to have remarkable cross-cultural similarities in both arousing and non-arousing contexts, hence they likely represent some “pre-programed” behavioral set.

To be clear: We do not think that religious rituals are activating sexual arousal pathways. We highlight the similarities to make the exact opposite point. Human submission systems appear to trigger a primal feeling of satisfaction that is deeper and more basic than sexual satisfaction. Dominance and submission need not always be about sex and sexual arousal.

If amassing power or wealth is critical to a given person’s goals, they may be better off leveraging the power of submission. Historically this pathway has been used to great effect through an “all-in” submission to something a person sees as worthy of their submission. This master doesn’t need to be another human being; it can also be a more abstract concept or goal—such as the preservation of freedom.

By exploring pathways that originally evolved to help our ancestors know their place within the tribe, we can learn to manipulate them (and the mental states they create) to better achieve our goals. It is much easier to set aside all the silly distractions of life, all our vanity, all our insecurities, and all our fears when leveraging deeply rooted submissive instincts and surrendering to a master—even with that master being something so abstract as animal rights, aesthetics, learning, independent thought, or the human race. In its obsession with personal liberty, secular society belittles our ancient and deeply optimized submission systems.

There are also huge benefits to glean from our subconscious dominance systems. Asserting dominance can help humans suppress distracting emotions. It is very hard to both be in a dominant mental state and be sad, angry, or afraid, just as it is hard to see someone expressing sadness, anger, or fear as truly dominant. Alas, given how much secular society glorifies victims and indulgence in stress while vilifying the concept of presumed power over other people, most people grow up without the evoked set necessary to tap into this ancient part of our consciousness.

How does one salvage this old, rusted, heavy-lifting machinery built through evolutionary pressures and left dormant by secular education? First, learn to indulge in a pathway’s purest form by attempting to empathize (perhaps through daydreaming) with fictional characters you develop from scratch—characters who are naturally dominant and submissive. Next, ramp up the system yourself in small scenes with a partner. We explicitly recommend that these scenes not be sexual. Even if an individual is highly aroused by dominance and submission, these pathways can be activated without arousal, which is the form of dominance and/or submission you will want to learn to use in your daily life. As a side benefit, once you learn to utilize dominance and submission in a non-arousing context, you can then experiment with them in an arousing one.

Sexuality & Morality

As we reach our conclusion, it’s time to focus on takeaways. If we could get this book to nudge just one idea into the popular consciousness, it would be that a person’s sexual aversions are just as much a part of their sexuality as the things that turn them on—and that turn offs and turn ons are likely operating off the same systems.

As we are not given a framework for accepting and normalizing our sexual aversions, it is easy for ideological extremes to confuse individual sexual aversion with moral truths. This leads some to impose worldviews on others that are corrupted by their own sexual predilections.

Ideologically, a man may believe a woman should be free to sleep with as many individuals as she wants, but because he personally has a strong sexual aversion to promiscuity, as some men do, extremely promiscuous women will trigger a “disgust/ick” reaction in him (this reaction likely evolved to ensure men didn’t choose partners who increase their odds of accidentally spending resources raising children that were not their own). If he did not understand the biological and amoral origins of his instinctual aversion to promiscuous women, he might try to rationalize that feeling by concluding that promiscuous women are morally bankrupt.

This very thinking is why people used to judge the deformed and diseased so harshly. It used to be common for people to view suffering from something like leprosy as a sign of moral failings on the part of a victim. Upon seeing those with disease and deformities, people received a strong aversion response (likely evolved to encourage us to distance ourselves from people with communicable diseases) and because they felt an aversion response when looking at these people, they assumed these people must somehow be immoral.

Humans still feel this aversion response today (though we might be able to desensitize ourselves to it through overexposure). Nevertheless, our society has evolved in this respect to a point at which we can feel this biological aversion without letting it interfere with our judgments of the morality of sick and deformed people. Hopefully someday, we will manage to achieve the same level of enlightenment with humans’ sexual attractions and aversions.

On a related note: Present society’s failure to adequately accept the unchangeable sexual aversions with which we are born has compounded the obstacles in some groups’ fights against discrimination. Some advocacy groups push away potential supporters because they cannot understand how someone can have an involuntary sexual aversion to them without seeing them, personally, as gross. This is unfortunate—most people would think the idea of two elderly retirement home residents in a relationship is sweet and support their relationship, but nevertheless be grossed out by the idea of them having sex.

Even well-intentioned moral policing of what turns people on can trigger bad outcomes. To deal with the reality that many women experience sexual arousal from violent rape, some have taken to saying that it is not “real rape” that turns women on; rather, some argue that women are turned on by “fantasized rape” or “fake rape.” This is true for some people, but it is categorically not true for others. When you start making statements like this—that real rape doesn’t turn any woman on—what does it mean when a woman orgasms while actually being raped? What if she finds herself fantasizing about it later or roleplaying the experience with her partner? Does that mean she really wanted it? Does that mean it wasn’t a real case of rape because the victim orgasmed or had intrusive fantasies about it after the fact?

Trying to signal how enlightened you are by arguing against the realities of our twisted biology and world has real effects on real people.

Conclusion: Relationships, Sex, & Society

By scrutinizing kinks and their implications, we journeyed through a wealth of theories, findings, and observations about human sexuality. To tie things up, let’s discuss the implications of human sexuality on relationships, sex, and modern society. Think of this chapter as an exploration of how the ghosts of early human societies, traditions, relationships, and arousal patterns haunt our modern dating world.

Why is this such an important topic?

Humans living in the 21st-century experience three sets of drives, each at odds with one another:

Our biology, our culture, and our aspirations for our futures are in a conflict that plays out on the battlegrounds of our relationships, dating, and sex lives.

The conflict between these drives creates frustrating externalities that destabilize societies and suppress happiness. While there is no easy path around these externalities, there are nevertheless actions that might be taken to ameliorate their effects.

Let’s be blunt: Society is not handling the transitions associated with sexual freedom well. Sexual freedom is celebrated with the grave misunderstanding that humans are rational actors and that, when given freedom, humans will utilize it in a way that benefits all. In reality, humans are self-interested animals constantly chasing after an idealized self-image, only experiencing brief moments of lucidity. We do not claim to be any better.

At present, society appears to advocate for:

We understand why this system sounds like a good idea. These standards grant us freedom and equality while not completely abandoning traditional institutions. Alas, this half measure system just isn’t working.

Explaining why this system isn’t working out requires a bit of context. Let’s pick up where we left off in our discussion of how humans likely evolved the kinks they have. In a world in which most humans lived in violent, polygynous, patriarchal cultures, how did we shift from those cultures to the largely monogamous society of a century ago? How did we shift from a large patriarchal monogamous society to the more equitable and idealistic relationship norms pervasive in Western society at present?

While polygynous, patriarchal cultures were likely the norm during early human history, every now and then tribes would pop up with different structures. Some polyandrous, some matriarchal, and some monogamous tribes emerged. Even though they appeared at much lower rates, monogamous cultures outcompeted their polygynous counterparts once humans started living in settlements above certain population levels.

A look at the data explains why this happened: When researchers control for socioeconomic conditions, polygynous societies show much higher rates of rape, murder, assault, robbery, fraud, spousal abuse, and prostitution (see the 2009 paper: The puzzle of monogamous marriage for a really interesting discussion of this). Why do we see this trend? Because unattached men act as caustic free radicals in a society. When the default relationship structure of a society in which men and women are born at about equal rates involves multiple wives pairing with a single man, you are inevitably going to end up with a lot of single men. Even today, terrorist activity in a region is highly correlated with the number of single men within it. We call the caustic nature of single males within a society the “free radical problem,” as they remind us of free radicals in physics: Unattached electrons that make chemicals highly caustic. It is little wonder that the monogamous tribes outcompeted their polygynous neighbors in almost every region of the world after human settlements reached a certain size because when you pair men and women off at a one-to-one ratio, the number of single men is dramatically lower.

If you want a good visualization, imagine a petri dish of agar (a sort of gel that acts as a solid growth medium). At first, the plate shows 98% red bacterial growths because red bacteria naturally form at higher rates than any other form of growth, but 2% of what isn’t the red bacteria happens to be penicillin. Even though penicillin appears at much lower rates, over a few weeks almost the only thing left in the agar is penicillin.

Notes from the Research:

In short, while humans are “naturally” polygynous, monogamy as a social structure is significantly more stable above a certain population threshold. For this reason, societies, religions, and other groups that adopted monogamy or monogamy-ish frameworks outcompeted those that promoted unconstrained polygyny. Because humans have come to cluster in larger and larger population centers for the past few thousand years, the human race has been mostly ruled by societies in which polygyny was only normalized for the top fraction of a percent of the population—if at all (we make this exception, as most of these monogamous societies did normalize pseudo-polygynous relationships—such as married couples with mistresses on the side—among the upper echelons of society). Within these historical monogamous cultures, women were by and large still treated as second class citizens and to an extent like possessions of the men they were attached to.

Recently, something very strange happened: People started caring about the wellbeing of other humans. We began to believe that humans had rights and should be treated equally—that people should be able to do what they want and have equal opportunities available to them regardless of any conditions associated with them at birth, be they sex, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Moreover, we developed the technology—effective birth control—to make rethinking how relationships work a possibility.

Perhaps even more strangely, we began to contextualize love as a good indicator of who one should marry. We cannot stress how strange of a concept this is and how rare it is cross-culturally. It appears this concept began within Western culture through the chivalric literature concept of courtly love, typified in poems like Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. This poem did not argue that people should marry whomever they love, but that two people who love each other should have sex regardless of their existing relationships or place in the world.

The idea of courtly love became wildly popular, but not all authors were comfortable with the adultery or interclass romance it implied, so it gradually became sanitized. “OK,” authors began to reason, “Sex with those you romantically love is OK, but you have to marry them first—and if it seems like you are from different classes, we will reveal at the end of the story that you were secretly from the same cast all along.” To put it more simply, the idea that love should be the basis of marriage is not some deep human truth, but rather the product of a trend in the medieval version of pervy romance novels—and the concept of love-based marriages was only added later in the tradition because it was the only way to depict characters who loved each-other “at first sight” to have sex without featuring adultery.

This is why early Disney stories descended from this tradition commonly depict two characters meeting and immediately getting married seemingly out of nowhere (a trope made fun of in the movie Frozen). Marriage was incidental to the story format, pasted on top of an older tradition like a fig leaf. What was “supposed” to happen in those stories is the princess gets rescued, falls in love, and subsequently bangs the guy who saved her. The idea that you should choose who you marry based on who you love is nothing but an accident derived from a panicked attempt to sensor adultery in pervy medieval novels.

This glamorization of love, combined with the free love movement, birth control, and a belief in human equality, come together to create the theory that if we just let people do what they want sexually, people will all sleep together and learn to love each other through the process, after which people will pair off with the individuals they love most.

Unfortunately, this theory has not proven to be sound.

Slut Shaming & Impossible Double Standards

Where in the process of moving from patriarchal and monogamous societies to a free, equitable society did everything fall apart? In what ways is the current model not living up to its goals?

Before the rise of gender equality and the sexual revolution, women were disadvantaged in the job market and not offered the same social protections as men. Women were therefore forced to leverage social institutions and cultural norms that encouraged them to trade sexual/romantic access for protection and resources. These systems ranged from the norm of a male breadwinner in a marriage to conventions around males paying for dates and offering gifts.

As women gained more equality within society, this exchange of sex/love for resources became less necessary. A portion of females decided it made sense to just sleep with whoever they desired. This development led to the rise of slut shaming—from both men and women—which produced a “no win” scenario for both the shamed and the shamers.

Let’s take a moment to explain what we mean by this and how it came about. We will start by exploring the economic pressures that caused slut shaming to come to exist as a cultural artifact in women and then discuss why men started slut shaming as well.

Why Women Engage in Slut Shaming Behavior

Women slut shame other women more than males do (or almost as much as males do—it depends on your chosen dataset[[63]](#_ftn63)). If presumably women disproportionately suffer from slut shaming, why is this tactic so frequently implemented by women and where did it come from?

Imagine a social group of ten men and ten women going about their lives as societal expectations transitioned away from women trading sexual access for personal investment and toward greater financial independence and “free love.” Two of those women will have sex with anyone regardless of investment given—be that investment emotional or in the form of resources. When given the choice between a woman who wants something in exchange for sexual/romantic access and one who doesn’t, these ten men will usually choose the woman who doesn’t (it’s a strict case of less investment for the same output).

These two women will therefore ruin the sex-for-something-in-exchange economy in the same manner a worker crossing a picket line destroys a union’s ability to negotiate. The only way the eight women in this group can protect their ability to trade sexual access for something would be to attach a negative externality to the act of having sex without securing at least emotional investment. This negative externality historically manifested as slut shaming.

While slut shaming is usually just social shaming, it can go much further and have massive self-image and career effects on the women targeted. Not only does slut shaming dissuade women from taking this “no-exchange” path through social punishment, but it also lowers the value of these women in the eyes of the men of the group.

While gender equality was being normalized, some women wanted to protect this old sex-in-exchange-for-something(specifically, emotional investment) system, and their only tool for protecting the old system was slut shaming.

This battle was lost generations ago. A study seeking to determine how many dates the average woman has before having sex found the most common response to be zero—that 32% of respondents slept with their current partners before their first dates. Despite the war being long over, slut shaming persists as a powerful social artifact of an earlier time. To a great extent, slut shaming represents that aspect of our cultural unconsciousness that always yearns for the past and wants to return to the old system.

Interestingly, once individual women realized they could leverage slut shaming to apply a negative externality to other women’s social status and prospects on the dating market, some began to use it as a cudgel to attack any female rival deemed to be a threat (regardless of said rival’s actual sexual behavior). This can be seen in a neat paper from 2004: ‘‘Good Girls’’: Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus. This study found high status women used slut shaming to prevent lower status women from gaining power within local dominance hierarchies. Even though this cultural artifact no longer serves its original purpose, it is simply too useful a weapon to leave buried anywhere but in the backs of those who threaten us.

Should the average woman wish to have genuinely good odds of securing a well-matched partner within today’s mainstream dating market, she has to undertake actions that will incite derision from her peers, coworkers, and likely even a little voice within her own head (obviously, some women get lucky and secure a partner without flipping this switch, but we doubt even a woman in such a position would claim that luck wasn’t a huge factor in her outcome).

How anyone could think this system is “working” is beyond us. The only way for a woman to realistically compete on the dating market (outside of extremely conservative and religious micro markets) is to take actions that will inspire others to shame her and make her feel poorly about herself.

Notes from the Research:

In the ultimatum game, an individual wins a sum of money and chooses how much to give to a third party. That third party—aware of how the sum of money was split—can choose to not accept the amount given to them, and if they proceed to reject the offer, neither individual gets anything. Female participants in this study frequently preferred that neither participant receive anything if the other player was dressed in a sexually accessible fashion, while men appeared not to care.

Why Men Engage in Slut Shaming Behavior

A world in which women expect nothing in exchange for sexual access may sound like a dream to men, but the reality of that world is as bad for men as it is for women. In a marketplace in which men bear no cost for female sexual access, all of the females sort to the same, few, high-value men. This is not conjecture—it is easily observable in the data.

A male of average attractiveness is liked by only 1 out of 115 women on Tinder. The average man should expect less than a 1% interest rate on the dating market. Keep in mind that half of men are below average. Men therefore benefit from slut shaming as well. If the average guy can convince women to play in a one-male-to-one-female system, he is much more likely to secure sexual access to a female. The fact that there is a price associated with female sexual access (whether that price manifests as fidelity, emotional investment, or financial investment) ironically works to the benefit of the majority of men.

Problems associated with a lopsided sexual market (a small number of men sleeping with the majority of women; women failing to secure commitment or emotional investment from men) is getting worse every year as society gets more comfortable with sexual freedom. According to one study, 28% of men between 18-30 report not having had sex in the last year—that’s almost 300% higher than the same figure one decade ago. Women, on the other hand, show no such effect. When the blog Overcoming Bias did a follow up on this figure to determine whether women were having sex with older men or all sorting to the most desirable younger men, they overwhelmingly concluded that women were sorting to the same, more desirable younger men.

Partially as a result of this, many “below average” men have just clocked out of the game, with 35% of men between the ages of 18 and 35 living with their parents compared to just 29% of women in the same age group. While we don’t think it is a good thing that so many guys are primarily motivated towards success through a desire to secure a partner, we think it would be imprudent to deny that it’s a huge motivating factor for many men and when it is clear to a man that he does not have a chance in the new game, his motivation will be dampened. This has obvious negative effects on society.

Again, this battle is long lost, but its cultural imprint is strong. It overlaps with that left by our monogamous forefathers and the behavioral impulses of our patriarchal polygynous ancestors. These mixed imprints create a dating environment that is complicated and, by our judgment, broken. The Gini coefficient of 0.58 for men in the dating market makes the market less equal than 95.1% of the world’s economies. Women have sorted to the highest value males while leaving low-value males angry and desperate and high-value males with no motivation to emotionally invest in relationships. In fact, the data shows this increasing as a trend, with the number of men having regular sex dropping precipitously over the past couple decades while the number of women having sex has only dropped slightly.

This failed dating market is worse than a failed economy because even the one group who seems to be on top—the “rich,” high-value men—are not benefiting in this failed state. Because high-value men are not motivated to invest in relationships, they form loving pair bonds at much lower rates than they would in a stable relationship market (the stats are really clear on this point: More attractive men invest less emotionally in relationships). In other words, while high-value men have easy access to sex when contrasted with lower value men, they are less likely to get to feel love (and this is just our opinion, but life without love strikes us as just as depressing as life without sex).

In the end, no one is really happy with this situation.

Many women feel inexorably drawn into a life of serial monogamy with men who have little emotional dedication to them. They play a game of increasingly pointless musical chairs until they realize their biological drive to have children hit them harder than they anticipated, get fed up being asked why they don’t have a spouse, or start to worry about spending life alone. As many women who hit these junctures don’t have enough time to secure the man of their dreams, they are left in a mad scramble for a pool of subpar and bitter partners (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships for a breakdown of the stats on this—desperate dash for subpar male partners isn’t just a stereotype, but rather a reality of the current marriage market for many players). Alternatively, some women decide to veer off the path society has set for them but must then contend with peers and family constantly asking about their current score in a game they have decided not to play.

Meanwhile, below-average men are getting no partners until the ladies’ game of musical chairs stops, leaving them feeling cheated, and high-value men are so inundated by potential partners, they don’t value any enough to form the deep emotional connections many humans require in order to glean a feeling for fulfillment. The data bears all this out: Sex rates have plummeted for millennials, especially millennial males, as have marriage rates.

These trends stand out clearly in marriage data, which shows marriage rates halving in the last few decades. The data makes it clear that this isn’t because people want marriage less or that people are more disillusioned with the concept. Interest rates in marriage are only declining slightly, not at levels big enough to explain the drop in actual marriage rates. What the data seems to show is that men who are getting regular sex easily don’t want to get married until they are much older. (On the bright side, divorce rates are also going way down, perhaps due to the later marriage ages.)

To put all this simply: The old system of gender inequality, chastity until marriage, and pseudo-arranged marriages sucked and needed to be replaced, but the new system we have adopted doesn’t “work” either. Worse, the period of transition between the two systems created cultural artifacts that make the new system uniquely unpleasant.

The problem isn’t that we have insufficiently embraced gender equality and sexual freedom—the problem is that sexual freedom, at least in a sex-in-exchange-for-nothing sense with no other social norms applied, doesn’t work on a societal level. Like communism, sexual freedom sounds great until one remembers to account for the fact that we are humans and humans are self-interested monsters impotently grasping at our own sentience like a middle school virgin attempting to unfasten a bra.

The Future of Sex & Relationships

Given its Gini coefficient (demonstrating profound inequality at the level of a collapsing, war-torn country), the current relationships system is transparently not stable. We can already see where things might be going, which makes this era of human sex and relationships uniquely fascinating and pivotal. We used kinks to explore where we came from as a species, then looked at how our sexualities and amouralities interacted with our evolving cultures to take us to where we are today. But where are we going? What will human dating and marriage look like 50 years from now?

We suspect society will split into a few cohesive philosophies around relationships and that these philosophies will gradually eat more and more mindshare until we reach a point at which the relationship philosophy to which a person subscribes becomes a key part of their public identity.

Let’s briefly explore a few relationship philosophies that we foresee becoming more prominent—with an understanding that we are presenting them in a generalized light (people will obviously deviate to create their own iteration of each).

Musical Chair Monogamy: This is the default societal model at present. Essentially, people go through a series of monogamous relationships that last a few months to a few years, then get engaged to the first partner with whom they spend more than three and a half years (after a certain age—between 25 and 35—with this age going up depending on socioeconomic status). After getting married, they practice a dual-income family structure (in which both partners work) and have zero to two children who are raised either by the state or a corporation.

TradCon Monogamy: There has been a recent resurgence of interest in a 1950s-inspired relationship fantasy, which involves people essentially cosplaying as the common trope of a “traditional,” nuclear family with a male breadwinner husband, stay-at-home home-keeping wife, and two or three kids. This model is often called TradCon (or traditional conservative). In a TradCon relationship, a submissive partner stays at home to raise the kids, cook, and clean while a dominant partner brings in an income and makes most of the rules.

During the dating phase, there is an expectation of significantly more chastity in this relationship model—as well as an expectation that one will find the person they marry at a younger age than in musical chair monogamy. One shift we expect to see in the TradCon model going forward is a greater emphasis on stay-at-home schooling. Given that mainstream culture paints TradCons more and more as something “other,” it only makes sense that those who ascribe to it will lean into their dedication to the model and its core differentiating feature: the exclusive dedication of one partner to the home and children.

The Poly Community: While the poly community is often thought of as being defined by individuals who have multiple sexual or romantic partners, it should really be thought of as more of a microculture dedicated to experimenting with and enforcing new cultural norms to combat the problems of the current system. This microculture includes some individuals who may define their relationship as “relationship anarchy” and others that would appear indistinct from monogamous couples—albeit with extended, close support networks—to an outsider (the poly community is often used as a model for the development of other new models for child rearing, such as the community-focused or “village” model promoted by some activists looking for alternatives to the nuclear family structure).

Essentially, the poly community should be thought of as people who agree to a new set of cultural norms about what should and should not be OK when dating and communicating within relationships. For example, poly culture alters expectations around whether monogamy must be explicitly established, what should be explicitly communicated before certain stages of the relationship, how disputes are handled, default assumptions about how finances should be distributed, and how consent is defined (how frequently it needs to be established, etc.). These cultural norms effectively ameliorate many of the larger dating market’s problems—be they slut shaming or the effects of the sex in exchange for emotional investment. The downside of these cultural norms is that they can make it difficult for those with more conservative sensibilities to participate in this community and create barriers to entry for new participants.

The Kink World: Seen cropping up around a myriad of kink communities—be they BDSM or furry-oriented—there are a number of quickly growing relationship models that explore new methods of interaction. Interestingly, most of these communities have borrowed rulesets created by the poly community (or maybe it’s the other way around). If society becomes increasingly fragmented, we expect various factions of kink lifestyles to meld with fringe iterations of other relationship styles rather than remain as independent as they are now.

For example, groups like the BDSM community are already drifting toward becoming a subgroup of the poly community due to their overlapping cultural norms, while the Taken in Hand faction has drifted toward becoming an extremist subgroup of the TradCon community (the Taken in Hand community promotes a TradCon-like relationship with more-BDSM-edgeplay-like frills, such as consensual non-consent, total power exchange, and impact play).

As a fun aside, consider the Goreans: A mostly extinct faction of the kink world that was fairly large in the early days of the internet and which proposed such a crazy solution to society’s sex and relationship market failures that we cannot help but highlight it.

Basically, Goreans said: “Oh, so now we get to do whatever we want? Well, let’s throw out all that monogamy crap and dismiss these silly aspirations for a peaceful, equal future. Let’s even throw out the myth that society used to be a better place. Let’s do things the way our early ancestors did them. Yup, let’s bring back slavery, buying and selling women, and traditional masculinity. Heck, you know what? Let’s also bring back tons of pointless rituals and traditions, but since we don’t remember the ones our distant ancestors used, let’s just lift them from a series of science fiction books (Gor).”

The Gorean approach to relationships is beautiful in its simplicity, and we love how it tackles present relationship market failures from an angle that even we wouldn’t have considered, we wouldn’t be shocked if we saw something like it resurface.

The Red Pill Model: The Red Pill started as a group of men who decided to leverage society’s unfairness to their advantage. The group got its name from The Matrix, in which the protagonist, Neo, is presented with a red pill and a blue pill—the red pill representing the true, sick reality of the world and the blue pill representing an unfulfilling, yet pleasant fantasy. Men who “take the red pill” contrast the lie they believe society tells—that the only way to secure sex and fulfilling relationships as a man is to be nice and deferential toward women—with what they perceive as reality: That such strategies only work for extremely high-value males.

Now that this movement has had time to mature and grow in size, it has had to develop new solutions for stable, long-term relationships. To this end, The Red Pill community almost presents an ideological counterpoint to the poly community in that it also explores varying relationship models and internally discusses them through “field reports” on online forums, comparing their relative efficacy—but instead of approaching their models from a perspective that presumes equality is one of the core goals of a relationship, Red Pillers do so from a perspective that presumes equality to be an impossibility and that relationship structures must be developed from a self-interested perspective.

More than any of the models discussed so far, The Red Pill does not strongly promote the idea of having children, seeing them as a tool for financial extortion or forcing functions keeping people trapped in suboptimal relationships. We expect this to change within the next decade or so and are already seeing movement in that direction.

Note: You may be tempted to ask if there is a female-centric equivalent to The Red Pill, which somewhat misses the point. Yes, there are female Red Pillers who theorize on relationship models, but since The Red Pill presumes male dominance to be the key to a healthy relationship and grew out of pick-up artist culture, you intrinsically will not see many female thought leaders.

Intentional Singlehood: Right now, there is a passive understanding that staying single is an option; however, many regard singlehood as an option of last resort and certainly not as compatible with a desire to have children. We expect this to change in the next couple of decades. Both females and males are shortchanged in their own ways by the current system, and after exposure to a certain number of firsthand, second hand, and anticipated bad experiences, many are deciding the game is not worth playing.

MGTOW, men going their own way, is the most cohesive of these ideological movements. While MTGOW claims as members anyone who recognizes the suboptimal nature of our current dating and relationship markets and decides to engage in relationships through their own set of rules, it is primarily composed of men who have chosen intentional singlehood. Historically there have been cohesive female movements with similar goals, and we expect a few to arise again in the near future.

This is a movement to watch closely, especially concerning how intentionally single people decide to handle child-rearing. The rise of co-parenting shows one model of how this might work. Check out the website CoParent.com, which acts like a sperm donor network for both intentionally single individuals and gay couples of different genders who want to share child-rearing responsibilities. That said, right now most of the movement is either childless or involves children from previous relationships.

The Family First Model: In this model, an individual doesn’t date through college—or dates very little—and subsequently has a spouse chosen for them by their parents. That said, sometimes these individuals have significant influence over their final choice, with parents lining up a number of candidates for them to meet—or heavily influencing who they date—until they “click” with a winner).

Grandparents often live with the family or in a nearby community and play a heavy role in childcare while parents earn a dual income. Individuals in this model are usually expected to have at least one kid but rarely go above four.

Despite drawing derision from those with “modern sensibilities,” this model has a lot to recommend it from a statistical perspective and is more likely to lead to a loving, stable relationship than the musical chairs model (See The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships for more info on the stats here).

The NeoCorp Model: The historic precursor to the NeoCorp model, called a “corporate family,” was the predominant family model until the last century or so that we personally see as being unfairly ignored. The corporate family model is defined as a social unit organized around a family business. The family unit itself consisted of 7.5 children (historically), unmarried relatives, and live-in staff (who are seen as family members and frequently marry into the family, contrasting them with the type of staff typically employed by TradCon families and family first families). Rather than being raised by the state (as they are in the dual-earner model), raised by one parent (as they are in the TradCon model), or raised by grandparents (as they are in the family first model), children of corporate families were integrated into adults’ daily lives. Another unique feature of the corporate family involved parents interacting with society as a single unit rather than as two separate people with “their own lives.”

Dating was unique in these family structures, as people optimized for partners who could improve them and contribute to the corporate family unit (and not so much for sexual attraction, love, or a personality match).

Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, estimates that in 1800, 90% of American families were corporate families. Corporate families largely went extinct with the rise of male wage labor and the resulting “male breadwinner” / TradCon family structure of the 1900s, which, starting in the 1970s, was largely replaced by the “dual earner” family structure and its corresponding musical chair model (facilitated by the rise of female wage labor).

Still, we see many couples living by a revived and adapted version of this model with less structured gender roles, slightly smaller family sizes, different solutions for child rearing, and a more dynamic model of entrepreneurship—hence the term NeoCorp. This is the model we personally use and we expect it to continue to proliferate in line with the rise of remote work and the gig economy.

A Theoretical Solution

As society is now, is there anything we can do to ameliorate the dating market for individual Pragmatists?

Let’s break down the problems with the new model and the old model and see if we can find a solution:

Could a new model address both sets of problems?

Let’s try a little thought experiment: What if we reinstated arranged marriages, but instead of giving the choice to people’s parents whose values may not be aligned with those of their children, we gave the choice—in some respects, at least—to each individual?

We could have people complete the steps we outline in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life so they might determine their objective function (that which they want to maximize most with their lives) and work out how they want other people to see them. With these fundamentals sorted out, we would have people list their attractions and aversions as explored in this book, select their preferred levels of cognitive integration as explored in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, and state their openness to poly/monogamous relationships. Then, while controlling for similar levels of physical attractiveness, financial wellbeing, educational attainment, and ability to relocate, match these people to long-term relationship partners with well-matched profiles. Given the way love works in humans, these people would almost certainly fall in love after a period of time.

To prevent this platform being used for casual dating and ensure that it is genuinely used as an arranged marriage tool, participants would be expected to deposit some portion of their annual income before being matched. This money would be invested in savings and released after a certain number of years of relationship survival, providing the couple with a meaningful nest egg. Should a couple decide to terminate the relationship, their deposit would not be returned. This security deposit would offer a realistic way out of the relationship that is costly, but not prohibitively so.

We aren’t sure what we would do with broken relationship deposits, as were the organization to retain them, it might incentivize the organization to make bad pairings, and organizational behavior follows incentives. Perhaps the organization would fund itself through the typical two and twenty model common among financial investments, earning two percent of the assets under management and twenty percent of profits made above a certain threshold—but only from funds associated with active relationships. This would create an incentive to create lasting relationships and provide couples with good financial return.

This strikes us as a grand idea, but recall that we are completely insane. Because we cannot trust our ideas to have any relation to what a sane, even-minded reader might think, we will leave it up to you whether you think we should put a system like this together. If it sounds interesting to you, email us at Hello@Pragmatist.Guide. If we receive sufficient interest, we will put it together. If we receive a sufficient number of willing participants to make pairings, but not a sufficient number to create a full-blown organization, we will just manage some pairings ourselves and, in the place of a formal organization that engages in financial management, create some contractual mechanism that serves the same function.

Thanks for Reading

We thank you—from the bottoms of our blackened, mechanical hearts—for reading. We had immense fun putting this book together, as going through the evidence challenged many preconceptions we had. That moment of realization—that delicious: “Well, if I was wrong about X, what other aspects of my worldview were reliant on X as evidence?”—is always such a thrill.

We can only hope the book did the same for you. We hope some of the ideas we presented were new enough to offend you and make you alter some of your beliefs about how human sexuality works.

Many of the theories we shared in this book are probably wrong—radically wrong, even. That said, if people allowed the fear of being radically wrong to keep them from sharing ideas, humankind would be devoid of ideological breakthroughs, philosophical sea changes, and radical paradigm shifts.

If you ever want to chat, send us ideas about future books, provide us with feedback, or present us with challenging counterarguments, shoot us an email: Hello@Pragmatist.Guide. We generally do whatever we can to help other Pragmatists.

Finally, please leave us a review on Amazon/Goodreads. They make us really, really, really happy. We give what money we do make off these books to non-profits, so those brilliant, anonymous internet reviews remind us we aren’t wasting our time.

Supplement: A Tour of Our Research Findings

After not finding a sufficiently comprehensive picture within the research available to date, we conducted our own comprehensive studies on unusual arousal patterns. The purpose of these studies was to create a quick “charcoal rub” of the human sexual condition and human arousal patterns.

These studies were created using paid participants from a study participant recruiting website called Positly.com. We collected information through simple dynamic surveys (dynamic surveys enable us to ask subjects different questions depending on the initial answers they provide) that were coded using the web application builder GuidedTrack. We recommend both Positly and GuidedTrack to anyone else out there who likes conducting studies to fill in holes in the scientific research on a topic that interests them.

There are two types of readers: One type likes looking at and interpreting data for themselves; the other type wants someone else to digest the data tables and highlight interesting implications in a colorful, entertaining manner that maintains their interest. If you belong to the former group, we enthusiastically encourage you to just skim this section and dig into the stats on your own by only reviewing the data tables.

If you consider yourself a member of the latter group, please ignore the data tables, as most of the information they summarize is covered in the text. We have packaged our exploration of this research survey data in a tongue-in-cheek tour theme, both to make the dry content somewhat more entertaining to read and in an attempt to leverage known heuristics to help people organize details in their minds that would otherwise be a jumble of sequential data points. In a memory palace, the use of shocking visualizations as well as spatial positioning within a fictional world aids recall.

So please, dear reader, step into our nerdy stats vehicle and buckle up.

Our tour starts with the requisite safety video. Before you begin digesting our research findings, we want you to be fully informed of the flaws of our study:

  1. We were unable to collect data from people without notifying them first that our study is about sex and kinks. This means our sample population is comprised only of people who were comfortable participating in a study on that subject. Other than that, our study participants were fairly representative of the US population. In cases in which our research overlaps with studies published in peer-reviewed journals, our results do not deviate significantly from mainstream findings, suggesting that our sample population was pretty representative or at least no more biased than other studies.
  2. Our study had around 250 participants. While this sample size is large enough to reveal some general trends in a population, it is not large enough to protect us from false positives given the huge number of factors we investigated in our survey. Even if certain data only has a 3% chance of reporting a false correlation, someone testing 100 variables for correlation is likely to find at least one false positive given the sheer number of tests they are running. Think of this study as a rushed charcoal rubbing of human sexuality, rather than an accurate, hyper realistic portrait of the subject. When our study contradicts peer-reviewed research of which we are aware, we assume the peer-reviewed research is correct and highlight the contradiction.
  3. We failed to recruit a sufficient number of trans participants to get breakdowns on trans people as a distinct demographic, so whenever we contrast men and women, we do not include participants that identify as trans or non-binary (though as you know from our earlier discussion of this topic, we think a significant portion of the population that identifies as cis may ultimately not be as cis as they would otherwise suppose). We brainstormed methods for sourcing an adequate number of trans participants at a reasonable price that wouldn’t also create a biased pool of participants, but found no viable, economical solution. Were we to recruit trans survey participants from a single community, their answers could be quite biased.

Why did we not just include trans participants in the pool associated with their gender? Multiple studies show that around 40% of trans individuals report experiencing changes in their sexual attractions during hormonal transition, meaning we would need to test trans people in at least three different groups: No hormonal transition, post hormonal transition, and undergoing hormonal transition. Were we fortunate enough to recruit a sufficiently large group of trans participants, we could ask really detailed questions that parse out stuff like which male arousal patterns are tied to their gender and which male arousal patterns are tied to hormonal states associated with males but divorced from the male gender itself. We find this topic really interesting, as it could unlock how specific hormones affect arousal patterns, so if any of our readers have ideas as to how we might affordably source an unbiased representative pool of trans participants, please email us at Hello@Pragmatist.Guide.

The Hall of Arousing Art: An Exploration of Sexual Fantasies

OK everyone: All set? Away we go!

Our tour begins in the Hall of Arousing Art. This should serve as an excellent starting point for our sexual odyssey. Now is the time to get over your sexual hang-ups. Lean back and soak in the racy scenes to your left and right; this is a judgment-free zone and you may ultimately find over the course of this tour that more people are into kinky things than you had originally surmised.

We assigned a “kink” score to men and women who took our study. Much to our surprise, these scores came out more or less equal across genders (23.1 for men; 20.8 for women). This score was derived from the number of non-normative things that reportedly arouse a given study participant. We broadly define non-normative in this context as anything outside of penetrative sex between two consenting humans.

First, we would like to call to your attention the finding that most people don’t have one or two weird things that arouse them—rather, the average person is aroused by a whopping 22 weird things. Do you ever feel ashamed because a myriad of wacky things turns you on? You might be more average than you had thought.

Second, note that the idea that men and women may be roughly equally kinky flies in the face of a lot of other research out there, but in this case we feel pretty confident in our divergent data. Why? Take a look at the objects on display in our Hall of Arousing Art and you will notice not everything falls into the classic stereotypical definition of “porn.” We see some of our gentleman guests are confused by the deceptively unassuming library to the right—a library not visited in many other studies. That library is filled with forms of arousing art that women consume disproportionately: Romance novels and fanfiction. Don’t let the bookish presentation of these saucy materials deceive you. They don’t call these bad boys bodice-rippers for nothing—they are being consumed primarily for the arousal response they create in the reader, even if their consumption may not be to bring the reader to climax.

Erotic Material Exhibits

The following percentages of our male and female participants reportedly consume the following types of arousing materials:

| Arousing Materials Consumed | F | M | | --- | --- | --- | | Romance Novels | 47% | 4% | | Young Adult Novels (Erotic) | 15% | 4% | | Fanfiction | 17% | 8% | | Daydreams / Personal Imagination | 68% | 53% | | Short Erotic Stories | 46% | 24% | | Live Action Video | 53% | 81% | | Still Photographs | 23% | 59% | | Heavily Edited Still Photographs | 5% | 10% | | Hentai Video | 13% | 14% | | Hentai Images | 7% | 12% | | Computer Animation Video | 8% | 20% | | Computer Animation Stills | 4% | 11% | | Western Animation Video | 2% | 8% | | Western Animation Images | 1% | 10% | | Erotic Video Games | 4% | 15% | | Virtual Reality Pornography | 3% | 15% | | Traditional Printed Pornography | 19% | 27% |

Just marvel at these results: The number of women who consume erotic romance novels, erotic young adult literature, and erotic fanfiction when contrasted with men is shocking. To put that another way, women consume erotic romance novels at 1175% the rate men do!

Let’s take a moment to disembark from the tram and explore this library. You will notice that it is both very sumptuous and exceedingly vast. Romance novels comprise the single largest share of the current fiction market, with 74.8 million people in the US reading an erotic novel in 2008 and 90% of them being women. In contrast, only about 100 million men within the US (and Canada) accessed online porn within the same year. This means the romance novel industry—the female-focused arousal industry—is likely more profitable than the entire male-centric, traditional “pornography” industry. This makes sense, as most traditional pornography has moved to an ad-supported model, whereas individuals still pay for most of the romance novels they consume.

So, what exactly gets women so aroused in these scintillating novels? Grab one or two off a shelf as we make our way back to the tram and continue our journey. Skim the back cover to get a picture of the leading romantic interest. Notice any themes? We do.

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