The Evolving Science of Why Women Cheat

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the controversial topic of infidelity, exploring the evolutionary psychology behind why people cheat. This thought-provoking discussion covers:

* Various evolutionary theories on why women cheat

* Surprising statistics on infidelity rates across different demographics

* The impact of age, business travel, and previous relationships on cheating behavior

* How modern technology and dating apps influence infidelity

* The difference between male and female cheating patterns

* Cultural and biological factors influencing fidelity

* The concept of "mate-switching" and its evolutionary basis

* How postmenopausal sexuality might differ from premenopausal sexuality

* The role of emotional vs. physical affairs in different genders

Whether you're interested in evolutionary psychology, relationship dynamics, or simply curious about human behavior, this video offers fascinating insights into one of society's most taboo subjects.

[00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today Today we are going to discuss the topic of why women cheat

Simone Collins: Ooh la la, have I done something?

No, I was watching a Chris Williams episode and he was interviewing a psychologist about this and the psychologist, honestly, I, I thought I didn't really agree with his interpretation of this particular question, but it got me thinking about the question from an angle.

That I hadn't thought about it before. Oh,

Simone Collins: interesting.

Which is not, why do specific women cheat? Okay. Why do women cheat at all, period? Like what, why is the, the, in, in human beings across cultures, you see cheating as a behavior pattern. Why do you see it cross culturally in humans? And isn't it

Simone Collins: pretty high?

I feel like Ayla did numbers on this at one point, and I was actually shocked by the proportion of both men and women that cheat.

We're going to go into the numbers. We're going to go into the numbers. We're going to go into how they differ [00:01:00] by ethnicity. We're going to go into how they differ by culture.

We're going to go into, Oh, you're going to get so much. But the point I'm making here is not all monogamous animals cheat. Um, So some animals that are mostly monogamous. Basically almost never cheat. Do swans almost never cheat? Well, I'll give you some that almost never cheat. Black vultures. Will the black

Simone Collins: vultures faithful?

Extra pair of fertilization in black vultures. California mice. DNA analysts suggest wild California mice have extremely low rate of extra pair of fertility. And I didn't know there was such a thing as

Simone Collins: California mice. Eurasian beavers. Okay. Geographically specific. It's just Californian mice.

I'm naming species here and by species, you're going to get different patterns.

Here's an interesting one. This is, this one's not going to be as funny for you because it's not the coyotes. Coyotes have a study of urban coyotes have found 100 percent monogamy over a six year period with no evidence [00:02:00] of any cheating. They're urban,

Simone Collins: so you'd expect them to be more

polyamorous. They're very urban, right?

You'd expect them to be polyamorous by now, right?

Simone Collins: Bizarre.

Macaroni penguins? And

Simone Collins: Atlantic puffins? Do they have, do they have top hats, Howard? What? Are macaroni penguins? Anyway, I need a picture of this. Those crazy looking penguins. The things. Oh, yeah, the ones with the little feather crowns.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Simone Collins: Okay, okay. They aren't, so they do wear hats.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Okay,

so historically, the most believed hypothesis, and it's the one that we argued for in our book, for the predominant reason women cheat, is to get better genes. This is the Beta, Bucks, Alpha, Fs strategy. This is the, I have a provider. Who I know is going to raise my Children, [00:03:00] but frankly, I can't secure a high value male who will invest in me, but most high value men, at least in a historic context, this is before child support.

And we often talk about the genetic effects of child support, not super positive. But before child support With a risk, historically, a man, and we'll get into the stats of how often this happened historically in a bit would just sleep with other women. Right. You know, so I, I, I, as a woman might only be able to get some fairly average looking, some fairly average competence man, but in terms of, you know, what I actually want, I want the powerful Lords kids.

I want the, or the person who has shown themselves to be You know, an amazing night and who is buff and who is fit and everything like that. But he's never going to settle down with a woman like me, but he, screw me. Right. You know, well, it didn't,

Simone Collins: aren't there some, there was a study at some point that found that women who were ovulating were more attracted to men who looked more Chad.

Yeah. So that's, that

was a part of this story is that that study has kind of [00:04:00] been debunked and that was a core scene as a core piece of evidence supporting this, but I, I want to go to you here. And say, you were telling me earlier about how, like all of these female romance books, it's always like, they don't talk about the personality, it's just how much power the guy has.

Simone Collins: Yes. Can

you talk about that?

Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah. A really weird thing that I realized after talking with Malcolm about sort of a common characteristic I've noticed of women in erotic material is, you know, it's, it's Really their sentiment, their enthusiasm, their, their, their kind of their personality to a great extent is a selling point.

Whereas in all of these romance novels, and I've gone through so many, I like reading romance novel reviews more than I like reading romance novels, which is really interesting. And also seeing how they're tagged. And. It does not matter if they are good people or bad people. It does not matter if they are kind or mean.

What matters is that they are dominant, especially high class as [00:05:00] perceived by society. So that could be that they're a mob boss. It could be that they're a billionaire. It could be that they are a fairy Prince, but they are high in the hierarchy and they have chosen for whatever reason. The female protagonist who typically is extremely annoying, but they had no, there's like no person.

There's very little exposition into their personality. There's not really a lot of description of it. Maybe they're a little cold, you know, like the only the only elements of their personality seem to have to do. With their dominance and status. So there's nothing beyond that. There's nothing like, Oh, he's like, he is really into knitting or, you know, he, he laughs whenever he sees dogs vomit.

I don't know, but like, I don't, I don't know how to describe people's personalities, obviously.

But it is interesting that women are actually quite superficial in what arouses them. And we talk about this in the pragmatist guide to sexuality, which is people are like, Oh, women are like, Not that sexual and men are really sexual like they look at porn consumption rates in men and the amount of time when you look at the

Simone Collins: romance novel industry, you discover that, oh my gosh, women are [00:06:00] very,

yeah, if you include erotic fan fiction and romance novels, porn consumption among women, women is almost exactly equal publicly for the love of

Simone Collins: God.

I mean, about it, like it's okay.

Yeah, well, it's a social thing for them, which is also interesting, right? Like there isn't the same stigmatization. Around talking what, you know, they're clearly getting off to that's, that's what they're doing when they're the 50 shades of gray. It's not for the story, right?

You know, this is a smut, you know, it is, it is a designed predominantly to arouse me. I

Simone Collins: actually tried to watch, I didn't, I couldn't read it, but I tried to watch 50 shades of gray to like comment on it in a podcast. For, that we did. I literally couldn't make it through. It was so bad. It was that boring too.

And the characters were that uninspired. That, it just, it's, it's really, it's awful. And so yeah, there is this sort of one note power dynamic thing going on. And

so, this one note power dynamic would support two of the potential, well, maybe more than [00:07:00] two of the, Actually all of the potential theories. It doesn't actually solve anything for us.

Yeah. But so, so better genes is one hypothesis. Okay. This was believed a long time in the field as like the predominant strategy, because one study reported to show that women, depending on their stage of the cycle when they were more fertile, preferred men who were more Like masculine and, and, and more of this like alphas type.

And when they were less fertile, they preferred men who were more resource providers for them and caring and everything like that very much. This, this, this dynamic, and that would have been created by evolution. If that had been a strategy and the mechanism of action of that strategy. The problem is.

Is when we wrote the pragmatist guide to sexuality, it had the initial studies debunking, it had come out, but like they hadn't been accepted as mainstream yet. And it had been like the mainstream perspective in the field for so long. I wasn't going to like throw it out. Now the, the, the studies that are more robust, they have been replicated.

And it appears [00:08:00] that that does not happen. Now I need to note here. That does not mean that women. From an evolutionary perspective, we're not engaging in this behavior. It just means you didn't have this mechanism of action promoting the behavior of the time of cycle in a woman. So note there. It also is interesting that you could even argue that hidden fertility in women At all, could be a signifier that women were doing this strategy.

So this is actually one of the big mysteries of human sexuality. In most other primates, a woman's period when she's fertile is pretty heavily signaled, like giant red butts or something like that, that they don't have during other periods of their cycle. But in humans, it's covert. You as a male, are going to struggle to tell if a woman is fertile or not fertile, depending on the way she appears to you.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, unless she's on her period, in which case it is technically possible to get pregnant, but [00:09:00] very unlikely, but still, and that you kind of know that the odds are extremely low.

Okay. So, this is likely to ensure that the sexual capital of a woman is preserved across all periods of her fertility window, which indicates that some of these strategies.

May have been at play here, but we'll get to some of the other, the predominant strategy after this one, after the Oh, they're going to cheat strategy was a strategy that said the predominant where reason women cheat is because they are looking for a better partner. I E a woman cheats when she thinks she can secure a partner who is better than her last partner.

And they use this as like a, Interstitial period. And this is

Simone Collins: what I hear most from at least 10 years ago. What I heard most when I hung around red pill communities, that this was hypergamy and this was why women cheated and left whenever they saw a better option, they just hop onto it.

Yeah, potentially.

So. And here I would note some dumb [00:10:00] reasons why people say, so some people really hated these two strategies, like some feminists did. Originally feminists loved these strategies, they were the best, because it gave women agency, right? Like, but then they started hating it because they're like, it paints women in a bad light.

So they came up with this genuinely insane strategy that women were cheating for genetic variability. This was a

Simone Collins: feminist theory for why women cheat.

Yeah, that like women were better off having more genetic variability in their offspring. Oh,

Simone Collins: okay. So, okay, to have different baby daddies for all their children because if, if they happen to reproduce with one man who just had two.

terrible cancer risk. At least that was only passed on to one of her children.

Yeah, except the problem is that if you're doing the math of genetics, right? Genetics doesn't exactly care about you as an individual, right? So, Because it all washes out in the math, it actually doesn't matter if you had the kids with one partner or with multiple [00:11:00] partners.

Do you, do you understand why that would wash out in the math? So, as me as an individual, right, I have statistically increased the odds that one of my offspring will survive if my partner had whatever, whatever. Potential disease, but the individual gene hasn't by that, what I mean is if I have five kids with one guy and five kids with another guy.

Okay. And I'm choosing from a pool of a thousand men. All right. And half of the men in that pool this, this gene that ends up with their children dying. If your kids get it right. And the other half of the men in that pool of a thousand men don't have that gene. Okay. And now me as a woman, I have two sets of potential genes.

One gene says cheat. One gene says have 10 kids was one guy. Statistically speaking, these functions actually get passed on at exactly the [00:12:00] same rate, because genes don't care about you as an individual, okay?

 Realized this might still be confusing for people. So I'll explain the math here in another way. The probability that a gene gets transferred to the next generation is determined by the percentage of the children that the average carrier of that gene both has and survive.

So we're going to put women into two categories, one category, 50% of their genes, or with one guy, 50% of their genes. They're with another guy. This is called category one. The second category, we're going to call it category two. They always have all of their kids with one guy. Okay. And so we're going to assume to make the math easy that each of these women always has 10 kids.

And we're also going to assume to make the math easy that guys exist in two categories, X and O If you have kids with an X guy. , those kids all died for a genetic reason. If you have kids visit, oh guy, those kids all survive. All right. So if you are a type one woman where [00:13:00] 50% of your kids is one guy, 50% of your kids with another guy. You have three types of pairings, you can have, you either have a, an ex pairing where you have 50% of your kids with the next guy in 50% of your kids with an oh God, you have an X, X pairing. , and you have an O O pairing. All right.

So how many of your kids are going to survive on average 50%? All right, now you have a category, two pairing here. And the category two pairing, , you are monogamous, right? So you either have, , all of your kids are of the XX variety or the O O variety, right?

Because that's the only thing you have. Right. All of your kids are. With an X or was it now? How many of your kids survive? 50%. This does nothing to increase the survival odds. . Of a gene, it might increase the survival of your genes, but it doesn't do anything to increase the genetic selection pressure on aging.

I don't need to go further on the math on that.

It's just like an interesting little math thing. So it doesn't make sense. And even if you think about like [00:14:00] the marginal utility of this, it's just the marginal utility isn't that high. You know, especially when you consider the cost of cheating, which infanticide and stuff like that, men seem to have an infanticide instinct towards kids who are not their own non biological children living with a man have three X the rate of dying.

You know, Who knows why that's happening but we do know that our nearest ancestors, if you look at apes you know, often when they move in to get the women fertile again and to not care for another man's kids, they'll take the cubs and they will smash them on rocks. And then we can look at civilization developing.

What does the Bible say to do to the young children of the areas that you conquer? It says smash them on rocks. So this is a, we see it in our, Evolutionary ancestors. We see it in the earliest writings of what you're supposed to do when you conquer a territory that we have access to and it doesn't exactly make the Bible look good to keep this in it.

So I'm assuming that, yeah, humans have an instinct, an infanticide instinct, which makes the behavior really risky. And you are at least pretending to be monogamous. Yeah,

Simone Collins: [00:15:00] yeah.

So. That's, that's a ridiculous theory and I just need to note the ridiculous theory there and put it off to the side. So, mate switching is the next theory that they go to.

Maybe. What does mate switching

Simone Collins: mean? What, I mean, that's what cheating is.

Mate switching is the one I just described, where they're looking for a better mate. Oh, okay. They're looking for a better mate than their existing mate. And, but I've definitely heard this from women, right? When, when women talk about why they're cheating.

Simone Collins: I've never heard that, but okay.

I have seen people do it with me when I slept with people who had existing partners back when I was, you know, sexually immoral. And I didn't really understand why sexual morality mattered. Or just mate with whatever. I didn't, you know, I was a kid. It's like, yeah.

Simone Collins: So they, so what you, okay. You were the other man. Women were cheating on their boyfriends with you, right? Yeah.

And so I was telling you, some of them, I actually, I'd say it was pretty clear to me. The, well, they, they, they, what we'll get to is, is they seem to do it for all of these reasons. Some of them just were clearly [00:16:00] like, you're better genetically than my partner.

And I know I never could get a guy like you. So thank you for dating to sleep with me.

And then others were like, um, clearly trying to upgrade to me. to, to build a relationship with me. And you can tell pretty quickly.

One of the challenges when studying sexuality is a core source of information we have on sexuality. Is our own arousal patterns, but the problem is, is human arousal patterns are highly variable. And so I can go out and collect lots of information like I did in the. Pragmatist guide to sexuality, which we wrote. But at other times, , when I don't have a big survey in front of me, I just have to guess based on my own arousal patterns. And I just noticed something when I was going over this. Which is that. When I was sleeping with somebody else's partner. Oh, my.

My hotness standards would be lower. Then they were otherwise, , because they were [00:17:00] positively augmented. I E I gained more arousal from knowing I was sleeping with somebody else's partner than I gained from. , knowing I was sleeping with a partner that I had locked down. , it's funny. Just if anyone's like, oh, you're such a weirdo for saying this.

Trump has said the same thing. , so at least I know that I, and Trump have this arousal pattern. I suspect more guys might as well, because it would have been highly biologically advantageous that you are willing to make compromises on the genetic fitness of an individual. When it is unlikely that you are going to have to raise the kids that you had with that individual. Which is really interesting because I haven't seen that talked about in men.

But others were in the next category, which Robin Hanson actually came up with this category, which is information gathering.

Maybe they don't really know their sexual marketplace value. And they're trying to gauge what sort of partner they can get. Maybe they're trying to learn what. Ummm, so here's what sex is like. This was actually a core strategy for me [00:18:00] is that girls knew I was really discreet, in way to recommend their friends to me as a way to gain sexual experience so that they didn't embarrass themselves when they had their first time.

Um I think a lot more girls do this than guys know! And this is like a WHY?! You know, you shouldn't try all this dark triad stuff, you know, just be a decent human being, but also naturally dominant. Maybe that's a rare thing. Um,

And when I say be a decent human being here, I mean, Being nice to women and treating them with respect. I do not mean decent in an absolute or moral sense. Obviously. Sleeping with other people's partners., or sleeping with a girl who you know, is about to go on a date and sleep with this guy who she likes for the first time.

So she can try out sex. That's not a decent thing to do. Like I was not being a moral person back then. But I didn't contextualize it that way back then, because back then I was urban monoculture. , I had this utilitarian ethic sense, [00:19:00] which is to say maximize the amount of positive feelings in the world.

, and that makes me a good person and what somebody doesn't know doesn't hurt them and them having sex with me and me having sex with them. That feels good. Therefore, I have increased the amount of positive. Experiences in the world. And I don't need to think about what I just did. Uh, But anyway that is something that, that some women definitely do. The next is investment strategy.

So, the classic example of the investment strategy is a woman's essentially just trying to get investors. So you can think of this as a woman who has a kid and spends her day as a prostitute. Like, why is she doing that? Cause she wants money for the kids. She's not really trying to get pregnant from these other guys.

But you actually see this a lot where it's been studied in African tribes infidelity behavior. The investment strategy appears to be the predominant thing. When people are subsistence living getting that marginal additional income is incredibly important.

Simone Collins: And

so, that, that makes sense to me.

Now I guess

Simone Collins: you could argue that. [00:20:00] Many women, they may not actually be having sex with other men, but they may be in a relationship and then against their partners, their monogamous partners knowledge and perhaps preference, they may be on OnlyFans, for example, making money on the side.

Yeah, well, and I, and I think here interesting I haven't mentioned this yet, but people might be asking, why aren't I asking why men cheat from an evolutionary perspective?

There is no question as to why men cheat. It is obviously in a male's best interest if they are living in a world where some women are willing to cheat to cheat because me sleeping with another person and getting them pregnant does not lower the number of kids I can have with my dedicated partner, my wife, right?

In

Simone Collins: other words, men who Took the opportunity when they got it, had more surviving offspring, and therefore, you know, that's a trait that is going to be evolved into a population. Yeah,

I've got to put the South Park thing here

. As you've all seen on the news, our country is facing a major [00:21:00] crisis why? Why are rich, successful men suddenly going out and trying to have sex with lots of women? Why would a man who's famous Use that to try and have sex with lots of different women! And these rich celebrities have perfectly good wives at home! Why would they even think of sex with others? Dammit! I want answers! . Of course, we all know the normal healthy male thinks only of sex occasionally and has no desire for sex with multiple partners. Yeah, that's right, of course. Definitely true. Yes, we all know that.

Go on.

Men cheat when they have the option to, if they don't feel that if they feel often that they can get away from it, is generally when men cheat.

For me, like, I have noticed that the desire to cheat has basically gone away entirely since I started having lots of kids with you. And I think that's just because I'm like, oh, it's just not worth any, Individual risk to cheating for me anymore from a biological perspective. It sort of recoded my brain.

But You know, there's [00:22:00] there's just less desire right like um, and I think that that that also makes sense from a biological perspective But women women can't necessarily have more kids by cheating Right, like they they women's fertility can't be Presumably, if they stay with their husband and he is a healthy male, they should be able to max out their lifetime fertility window.

Simone Collins: Although I guess there are examples in history of women who did know that the, it was a male factor and fertility issue, in which case they would. This was the next reason, sterility. Oh, okay.

So women may cheat have a desire to cheat for the rare instance they're in their partner is sterile.

And this also would likely increase women's instinct to cheat within our existing environment. Because I suspect if you look at things like, you know, people talk about what is it like the, the two year itch, the seven year itch, et cetera. Right. I suspect we have sort of pre programmed into us the instinct to know when our partner might be sterile.

And if [00:23:00] you have been sexually active with somebody for a two year period and they are not pregnant, it means probably sterile. And if you have been sexually active for a seven year period and they're not pregnant, it They are 100 percent sterile, or you are, and it makes genetic sense for both of you to try new partners.

This is why I think modern relationships just don't really work, because people aren't having kids and the relationship's supposed to transition to the next phase.

Simone Collins: Hmm. Interesting.

Here. I wonder if this is part of why polyamory has become so common in our major cities. Eve you have an environment where the vast majority of people are childless or functionally childless, because this isn't something. I think people don't understand if you have one kid or two kids, you're functionally childless from an evolutionary genetic perspective. , a lot of people are like, well, what do you mean?

Like you, you know, you have a lot of kids with your partner and then sired a cheek goes down and it's like, yeah, if your partners regularly having kids, but a lot of these celebrities, you know, they have two kids or one kid and from a [00:24:00] biological perspective, If you're talking about like our evolutionary context with how many of your children were likely to die. That's basically no kids. So, I wonder if., These incredibly low fertility environments cities. , if everyone doesn't at a biological level, see their partner is sterile and that's why they're all desperately going out and sleeping with lots of other people.

And then I have to ask, well, in a low fertility environment, does that mean polyamory is a stable relationship option.

, I mean, it's, it's, it can be intrinsically unstable, but it might be more stable than monogamy where you biologically assume your partner is sterile. So, the, the final reason why women might be doing this is protection, protection for their existing kids. This has been killing the children of women.

It's actually like kind of common in a lot of tribes. So if you study a lot of anthropology, I like reading anthropology texts. You'll often read of like a guy will get mad at a kid and just randomly kill them. They are less like

Simone Collins: [00:25:00] your own children. Okay,

And if they're like a successful hunter, there's nothing you can do about that.

They'll like the kid annoyed me. You know, And however, in those tribes, they're less likely to do that if they think the kid might be theirs. So women will sleep with these guys. Well, for plausible

Simone Collins: deniability of like, maybe this little s**t's mine. He pissed me off, but I am not going to kill him.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Oh, interesting. Okay. So, so I thought, I thought you were going to say protection for like, because It's a dangerous person in the neighborhood. And the, the the sleeping with them as an act of payment to keep them in your good graces. But what you're saying is it's no, if you have children and they think it might be theirs, that's protection.

Yeah. It only works in a small, like insular community. So that wouldn't be a common reason for women cheating today. So the common reasons for women cheating today, I guess, in a modern developed Urban society would probably be [00:26:00] information gathering or hypergamy.

Well,

Simone Collins: so

this is interesting. So you're going to have these pre evolved reasons to cheat.

And then the question is this, which are most active in modern communities? Yes. Right. But, but, but also what's really interesting is, is, and I think that this is not something that is. Like in the psychologist community, it's sort of a fight between these models. And I'm like, well, you know, you can have multiple evolutionary strategies operating simultaneously.

If people aren't familiar with our two, two of my favorite sexual strategies that we came up with after writing the pragmatist guide to sexuality, are both dual strategies. And they came from us understanding that humans exist in a variety of Circumstances. It might have polymorphic behavioral patterns.

That means the same genes can encode for two different phenotypes or two different behavior patterns. So in human females, we, we argue that it's likely a polymorphic thing. The more partners that they sleep with, like if a woman in a historic context had like 10 partners, It almost always [00:27:00] meant she was a sex slave.

She had been captured, her village had been raided, and she was being used by the population. And if she was not that, you know, because most of the successful widespread cultures, well, a huge chunk of the like small random cultures, you'll get like 89 percent are polygynous. Most tend towards monogamous when you're talking about the big successful cultures in history.

That, that most humans lived under. So, You know, but, but even the big successful cultures were allowed to keep sex slaves. You know, Muslims were allowed to keep a form of sex slaves. Jews were allowed to keep a form of sex slave. I don't know if early Christians were, but like even, even the Abrahamic tree, you know, like it's, it's, it's, it's common in history, buddy.

And so, it would have been Advantageous to women in that environment to have a mechanism for knowing they're in that environment and to then become turned on by the type of sex they would have in that environment to not be killed by their partner who likely doesn't value their life very much.

So that they get some chance at passing on their genes. And then in the [00:28:00] other scenario for the monogamous scenario. Women are much better off just forming an intense, dedicated attraction to an individual. And you actually see this in the data women who have not slept around very much tend to form an instinctual, really strong relation with one of the first people they sleep with often with the first person they sleep with.

Basically instantly fall in love with that person. They get a strong dose of oxytocin from the sexual encounters. I've seen this with girls I've dated in the past. Like, if they were virgins, and I really slept with virgins dispositionally, like probably 25 percent of the people I slept with were virgins because I preferred virgins.

I know that's horrible, but I think most guys sort of instinctually do. And it affected the way I perceived them in the same way that when somebody has slept with a lot of people that affects the way I see them from an arousal standpoint and a biological reason, that would be the case. It's not like I'm just a jerk here.

So anyway the Virgin it's very common. They like instantly fall in love and form this really strong attachment.

. Yeah, that was that, that, that makes sense. So there, you basically have a two female sexual patterns. One is [00:29:00] I formed an immediate attachment to the first person I sleep with monogamous optimized.

The other is if I'm being passed around a lot, I turn violentosexual which you can read in our stuff. Women. Liking sexual violence is actually really common in American. If you, if you look at like porn searches there was a book, a million little thoughts or something like that. The show that the violent porn searches are actually more common among women than men.

And there and we found really high rates of violence preference from women in our study as well. And I actually asked Aella, like, could she look by partner numbers? She hasn't published this, but she's looked at her own number. She said, yeah, it checks out. partner number women with really high body counts prefer sexual violence.

And often, you know, choking other forms of like extreme dominance consensual non consent, stuff like that. And they seem to have a preference for this polyamorous lifestyle which is sort of modeling what it would have been like. To be honest, I'd be a sex slave. So anyway can women recover from this?

I don't know. They might be able to and rebuild this old mindset, but like there wouldn't be a [00:30:00] strong evolutionary reason to recover from it because sex slaves very rarely turned monogamous, historically speaking. Then men have a dual strategy as well. And the male dual strategy is I argue that men would have had two core environments where they would have been impregnating people.

Okay. One is. sex slaves when you are raiding a settlement, when you are, you know, going out there, pillaging a village, doing war, you want to have a biological instinct to impregnate as many of these people whose partners you've just killed, you know, and we see this in modern religious texts from the period.

It basically says, yeah, they're fair game. They're, they're daughters, they're wives, you do these rituals, but after that they're fair game. And so we know, we know this happened historically speaking. So I need to have a sexual optimization function designed for that. And then I need a separate sexual optimization function designed for a monogamous wife who is going to be much lower quality.

If she thinks I'm going to treat her that way, right? And so it means that I suspect that men actually get turned on by [00:31:00] two different sets of things, depending on the context they're in. Do they think this person is a long term partner of theirs? And your body can tell if it's a long term partner. Then you're going to be aroused by doing specific things with them.

And do you think this person isn't a long term partner? Then you're going to be doing other things. And that's why I suspect the disposability in sort of male Porn consumption, right? Because, you know, you're looking at this disposable asset. Very violent often compared to other stuff.

And that's because the men are perceiving these as a disposable sexual partner, not as a long term sexual partner. And it causes young men to misgage their own sexuality. They think that they're this violentosexual type, this extreme dominance type when it's really, no, you're just that because you are.

You, you haven't had a long term partner yet and you don't know what your real sexuality is yet because you haven't had a chance to try it. You are judging your sexuality based on the porn you're consuming which is not an accurate representation of your sexuality. So those theories are uniquely ours.

I'd love to see them get out there in the world of sexual research. But the point being is they assume multiple types of sexual strategies overlapping. So I want to get to a study that was done recently, but I want to hear any thoughts you have before I do. [00:32:00]

Simone Collins: Well, I'm curious what you think the modern.

listener to this podcast should be taken away from it in terms of like, if he doesn't want to be cheated on, what should he be doing? Aside from being trying to become a dominant, high class billionaire?

Well, actually, cheating is a really replicated behavior, which we'll get to when we get to the stats after this.

So the number one thing to do is not marry a cheater.

Simone Collins: Okay, so once a cheater, always a cheater. If someone cheated, if they even cheated on you. They're gonna cheat. Not a hundred

percent. We'll get into the statistics in a second. Okay. But yeah you, you have a higher probability. And it, it appears that it's, it's not just like that cheating is trained into them.

It appears that there might be like a cheating genotype IE that there might be some polygenic score essentially for a preference for cheating. Which makes sense. That, you know, you would have different sexual strategies within different populations and cultures that are rewarded in different ways.

Hmm. Like, anyway. [00:33:00] I'll continue here. So, so he found, he was doing a study because he's trying to figure out, okay, is it mate switching? Is it better genes? Is that more like it? And he found that men rated their partners who they're currently with as better parents than the people they cheated with and that they rated the people they were cheating with as more attractive.

And that women did the same thing. Women rated their partners who they were whiz as better parents and the people they were cheating whiz as more attractive. Okay, and so he took this to mean, he's like, oh, this means better genes hypothesis is probably right. And I'm like, what? No, it doesn't. Okay. First of all, what you should have been asking is, are they a better source of resources?

Because that's really what the, the, the beta bucks alpha F's hypothesis is about. It's not, are they better parents? Of course, people are going to have an instinctual biological bond with their biological child and better parent them. We [00:34:00] know this from the research, biological parents try harder than non biological parents.

So of course, The biological father of your child is going to treat that child better than the guy you're effing on the side, like anyone who's broadly sane would know this. And then he was like, oh, and it's, it's really interesting here that, you know, Men found the people that they were sleeping with outside the relationship better.

Like why would they do that? It's like, because novelty is really important to male sexuality. Obviously you get a huge genetic reward. If you can sleep with someone and get somebody else to raise your kids. But now let's go over some stats. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So one funny study found that 20 percent of men and 13 percent of married women admitted to having sex with somebody outside of their marriage averaging to 16 percent overall. Men.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, everyone thinks it's just men who cheat though. And that's what blows my mind is it blows my mind that women cheat at all. But here's the

thing, a 2021 survey. [00:35:00] So I, the problem with the cheating data I get is it's all over the place. So 2021 study by health testing centers pulled 441 people.

And it found that a little over 46 percent of respondents in monogamous relationships said they had had affairs. Oh, that's because this is looking at monogamous relationships and not marriages. So 46, around half of people have cheated. Nearly 24 percent of marriages affected by infidelity report staying together.

47. 5 percent of relationships affected by cheating said that they established and enforced new relationship rules, such as sharing phone passwords to minimize the likelihood of more affairs. That's actually important. Like what's, what's the consequences of cheating? The relationship rules need to be restructured in favor of the person who has cheated against often.

Recent studies estimate that approximately 1 to 3 percent of men are unknowingly raising a child that is not biologically theirs. A 2022 study published by Human Reproduction found that 11 percent of men seeking paternity testing services were not the biological fathers of the children. For general estimates, these range between 0.

6 and [00:36:00] 0. 9 percent of men. So I'll make a note here. There's this myth that. around 30 percent of people are raising kids that are on their own. That actually came from men that were already highly suspicious. It's actually probably under 1 percent or maybe between one to 3%,

Simone Collins: depending

but this is in the developed world where you have contraception.

If you look outside of environments for contraceptive in common you get to rates around 20 percent to 30 percent actually if you look at cheating in these environments, it's often higher. So in a subsequent or in Africa, you get the 20 percent to 30% extramarital sex rate and for women, it's a five to 15%.

So, this is other interesting statistics here. Recent studies suggested that the prevalence of infidelity is underreported due to the way individuals are questioned about behaviors. Direct questioning revealed that 9 percent of women and 17 percent of men acknowledged to being unfaithful.

However, participants were provided with a checklist to identify specific sexual behaviors outside the relationship and the [00:37:00] numbers changed dramatically. The results gathered from the checklist. found that 15 percent of women and 27 percent of men engage in extramarital sex. Oh, so

Simone Collins: they're like, I mean, giving head doesn't count as cheating.

Obviously.

Yeah, well, the study was from 2018. It's called who cheats more the demographics and infidelity in America. this, this is, this is interesting. Surprisingly 56 percent of cheating men and 34 percent of cheating women consider their marriage is happy. So I think that this is another thing where a lot of people are like, well, I'm in a happy marriage, therefore my partner won't cheat.

And unfortunately that's just not what the data says.

Here is another study that looked at this a meta analysis of 12 infidelity studies among married couples found that 31 percent of men and 16 percent of women had. a sexual affair that entailed no emotional investment. 13 percent of men and 21 percent of women had been romantically involved, but not sexually involved with someone other than their spouse.

And 20 percent of men and women had engaged in an affair that included both asexual [00:38:00] and emotional connection. So that's really interesting. Men and women actually cheat the exact same amount when you average sexual and emotional cheating. It's just that women, when you

Simone Collins: count

both, Yeah. So it's 20 percent of men and women engaged in an affair that included both.

So they do it the same when it's both. But if you're looking at emotional cheating, women do it more. And if you look at sexual cheating, men do it more.

Simone Collins: Do you think men care about emotional cheating now?

Well, I mean, in studies, they just don't, not as much. They care. The

Simone Collins: thing is, I think men do physical, you know, like having sex with other people physically, where there's no emotional component.

I think would probably bother the average female partner less than an emotional affair. And I think that for men, Oh, an emotional affair that a woman has would probably bother him less than a physically sexual affair that she has. So it's probably nice that

this is well studied in the data. What you said, a lot of studies have been done on this and that's consistently [00:39:00] found across cultures.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

So you

Simone Collins: would definitely freak out a lot more if you had like a really strong emotional connection with another woman.

And I would. Freak out a lot more if I knew you were having sex with another man.

Simone Collins: Really? That's yeah. So there

you go. You know, I don't even know if I care that much. If I felt you had an emotional connection, how would you feel if I

Simone Collins: podcasted with another man?

I would be devastated if you podcasted with another

woman. Well we have, we have an episode with Ayla where it's just me and her that hasn't gone live yet.

Simone Collins: No, wait, that's gone live.

No, no. Then we recorded two episodes that day. So one of them hasn't gone live yet.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Well, I was. door knocking and the cold pregnant.

You

are so hardworking Simone. You are, this is why I can't leave you. Anyway so, so here's an interesting thing. So men are most likely to cheat between. Like when they're young, like back when I used to do it, right? So like when their testosterone

Simone Collins: levels are higher and then when they become more pair bonded and

yeah,

Simone Collins: wait, as, as men age, their, their testosterone levels probably go.

Yeah. They go down, they

go down when they're in a monogamous relationship and they go down when they have kids. So basically [00:40:00] evolutionarily successful men have low testosterone. I got my levels tested recently because I, Assumed they were low and apparently they're not low. Yeah, they're high, but now I know why they're not low because I did a, a 23 on me scan, not a 23 me.

It was a . No, this, this was

Simone Collins: your nebulous scan where you got the ? Yeah, it showed that I was in the

99th percentile in terms of testosterone rate. Yeah. The predictedness due to my genes and like that makes sense. We've done other episodes where I sort of talk about like a lot of people don't know what high testosterone looks like.

And I have a face that looks like a picture of a diagram of what somebody who developed in a high testosterone. I don't

Simone Collins: know where this, this trope of soy doesn't seem to. Correlate with actual

no, it doesn't because Andrew Tate is his face is the picture of a low testosterone. I

Simone Collins: think I think the whole soy boy thing more correlates with like how much time you spend in a gym and how developed your.

Various gym related muscles look and I, I mean it when I [00:41:00] say gym related muscles, it really aren't going to show up unless you actually spend time preening like a woman.

Well, yeah, it's about socially signaling to other men. We've talked about this. I mean, it is, it is preening in a feat and that's why women, I mean, there's all the memes from the gym bros that like they imagine that they're going to get fit and it's going to be women fawning over them, but it's just men fawning

Simone Collins: over them.

Women don't care. It's so like, there's. I've, I've read a decent number of romance novels and listened to a decent, you know, I, I've been exposed to this content less than 1 percent of this stuff has to do with any sort of description of musculature. Absolutely. Status dominance in terms of bearing matter being

Dominates in terms of bearing as well as is confidence and presence.

Simone Collins: Yeah confidence and presence

easily. You can't be Insecure you can't be

Simone Collins: muscles. I don't really [00:42:00] hear described that much. It's just interesting. Well,

this is one of the reasons people are like, why do you mention like that you've slept with lots of people and stuff like that? And it's because it's important in qualifying a big mistake in our society that in terms of securing a partner leads a lot of men to make a big mistakes in terms of time investment calculation.

And that they are investing a lot of time in honing their body more than they need to for health reasons are actually finding a partner. If you are doing enough exercise to be at optimum health, okay, you are going to be at optimum for finding most partners except for ones with fairly rare fetishes.

And that's, that's Unfortunately, just