The Government Destroyed Marriage: The Game Theory of Gender Dynamics

In this episode, Malcolm Collins delves into the game theory of gender dynamics and explores how different societies have handled gender roles, using historical context and data-driven analysis. He discusses the primary problem marriage solves—the prolonged dependency of human offspring—and compares human and chimpanzee productivity graphs. Malcolm reviews a piece by Arctotherium titled 'Human Reproduction as a Prisoner's Dilemma: The Decline of Marriage in the West,' offering insights into adversarial reproductive strategies and varying historical gender cooperation models. He highlights the consequences of modern shifts in societal norms, including unilateral divorce and welfare state implications on marriage and gender dynamics. The episode concludes with a conversation on the reasons behind declining marriage rates and the broader societal impacts. Tags: #GenderDynamics #GameTheory #MarriageDecline #SocialNorms #HistoricalContext #ReproductiveStrategies #WelfareState #DivorceRates

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Malcolm Collins: This is Malcolm Collins. Today we are going to be exploring the game theory of gender dynamics. How different societies have dealt with the game theory of gender dynamics. Multiple local optimums. So we're not just going to argue that pure Monogamy is the only local optimum and we're going to be using lots and lots of data to do this.

And we're going to be exploring this through a piece that I thought was very well done by Aporia, one of the best magazines out there. They've gotten in trouble a lot with Hope Not Hate, which is how you know they're good. This piece is written by Arctotherium. And it's titled, Human Reproduction as a Prisoner's Dilemma, The Decline of Marriage in the West.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the title doesn't suggest that things are moving in a great direction for

Malcolm Collins: marriage. Well, no, they're not, but I think solving the marriage problem is a big segment of the way to solving the population problem.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: I think [00:01:00] he lays this out with data in a way that is clearer than I had thought.

other people lay it out and brings up a few of the less obvious problems. If you're only looking at this from a modern context of what's wrong with the dating markets, instead of looking at a historic context. So let's dive into it. Simone get started here with this graph. I'll put on screen.

Simone Collins: The core problem marriage exists to solve is that it takes almost 20 years and an enormous amount of work and resources to raise children. And he shows this graph.

Malcolm Collins: Which it compares humans and chimpanzees in terms of the net productivity of humans and the net productivity of chimps over their lifetime.

Simone Collins: . The caption reads, In hunter gatherer societies, it takes almost 20 years for the average person to become a net producer of food. Until then, they are dependent on others, mostly their parents, who have a direct genetic stake in their survival. The numbers are similar for agrarian societies.

Malcolm Collins: Is, is this Up and [00:02:00] down line here is the amount of food that an individual is producing over their lifetime, or their net productivity.

So you see in humans, if you're looking at hunter gatherers, they don't end up net producers of food until they're around the age of 19. And then they shoot way up and they're like huge producers of food compared to chimps. Whereas chimps actually become food neutral at around the age of five and they go up almost immediately.

It appears that this period where chimps are lower because it immediately snaps to like, I'm a net producer of food at the age of five. But I don't contribute to the tribe yet is the period of which they are just like cling mode to mom because it's not going up and down. And then after that, at the age.

of a little under 15. They start producing for the tribe. My guess is this is just when they reach sexual maturity and start caring for children of their own.

Simone Collins: He continues, this makes human reproduction analogous to a prisoner's dilemma. Both father and mother can choose to fully commit or pursue other [00:03:00] options.

In this context, marriage provides a framework for encouraging, legitimizing, and stabilizing commitment. Defection. If human reproduction is analogous to a prisoner's dilemma, what does defection look like? A natural consequence of sexual reproduction is adversarial reproductive strategies. Females must expend significant biological resources, but can be certain of maternity, which allows maternal investment to pay off as soon as a child is born.

Males don't need to spend much biologically, but can't be certain of paternity. Making parental investment inherently risky by default. This leads to two idealized strategies that maximize the benefits for each sex in humans. The idealized male strategy is to have as many wives slash exclusive sex partners as he can afford plus opportunistic extra pair couplings consensual or otherwise the idealized female strategy.

Is to secure investment from a man while retaining the option to trade up for a more attractive man at any time plus opportunistic hidden extra pair couplings [00:04:00] with attractive men,

Malcolm Collins: both of these strategies, I assume most of our audience will understand what he means by that and see that as obviously true.

This is just like, obviously the genetically favorable thing for both parties. It is a

Simone Collins: truth universally acknowledged. Both of these strategies greatly damage the interests of the opposite sex. Cuckoldry is equivalent to death for a man from a Darwinian perspective. And in evolutionary environments requiring paternal investment, abandonment is equivalent to death for a woman.

Losing decades of youth and all of the resources invested in a pairing is devastating for both.

Malcolm Collins: So all of this, I think, is just laying out what we all know is true, like the obvious prisoner's dilemma that all couples are facing. Now he goes into the different strategies that people have chosen to deal with this in a historic context.

Simone Collins: Men defect, slash, women cooperate. A defect slash [00:05:00] cooperate society in which men act to secure the collective interests of their sex without regard to those of women looks like Meiji Japan, which was monogamous, or early 20th century Arabia, which was polygamous. In these societies, women are effectively property.

Divorce is common, Meiji Japan had the highest divorce rate of any country with records in the world, and devastating to women, who lose their children, economic status, virginity, and youth.

Malcolm Collins: So if you look at this chart here, which I find really interesting, it shows that in late 19th century Japan, they divorce rates several times higher than those of Northwestern Europe or the Anglosphere.

And these are really high. The divorce rates of Japan of this period are higher than what America's was in like the 1950s. Which is absolutely wild. Most countries did not reach this until you get around, let's say, 1950s, 1960s. And what this means is they can be like, okay, what does he mean that this [00:06:00] is an ideal situation in both Saudi Arabia and Japan if Japan was a monogamous society during this period?

What he's saying is these men functionally have multiple wives. So Because in Saudi Arabia, they just literally have a harem of wives that they're breeding with simultaneously in Meiji, Japan, which you may have is you are a rich man, you marry or just upper society man, given how frequent divorces were here you marry, you know, one girl when you're, you know, 18 and you stay married to her until she 30.

Or 35 and not producing kids as easily. You just marry the next wife. Then when she hits 30, you just marry the next wife. Basically who's the actor who does that, but doesn't have kids? Leonardo

Simone Collins: DiCaprio.

Malcolm Collins: Leonardo DiCaprio ing it. That's what they were doing in Meiji Japan.

Simone Collins: Thank God. He continues, however, a simple comparison of divorce rates between different marriage regimes is misleading since divorce is at the whim of the husband in defect slash cooperate societies, men are free to invest [00:07:00] in their family and children, which is not true in societies where men can lose their families against their will.

Furthermore. Paternal certainty in defect slash cooperate societies is guaranteed, which means such societies can be highly functional, especially when they have monogamy to reduce male , sexual competition. Meiji Japan was phenomenally successful economically, demographically, and territorially until destroyed by an overwhelming outside force.

Malcolm Collins: So this is really interesting. What he's pointing out here is so when you have a prisoner's dilemma, there are two strategies, right? Which is to say, or sort of three potential outcomes. No, I'll reword that. Sorry for potential outcomes. Both sites cooperate. Both sites defect. Or one side defects, whichever one it is here.

What he's showing is a side in which societally everyone basically agrees that males are defecting. That is what is happening in polygynous cultures where they are hurting the women's outcome and like, say, Saudi Arabia, where they take on [00:08:00] tons of different wives or in majority Japan, where they dispose of a wife.

The moment she's no longer reproductive age. That is hugely deleterious for women, but when men socially make this choice, which is deleterious for women, those societies stay competitive on a geopolitical scene,

Simone Collins: which is

Malcolm Collins: really fascinating.

Simone Collins: That is interesting. Depressing. Unfortunately,

Malcolm Collins: while men might be the disposable gender even within these societies, because more men in Saudi Arabia and in Meijing, Japan are actually disposable.

Like the lower category of men that's not breeding at all is larger in the societies where male defection, these are not better societies for men. These are better societies for the very best men.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Which is a very, very small number. It's like maybe 20 percent of men or, or less are getting all the benefit.

Yeah. But basically most men are worse off and most women are worse off. Most men are

Malcolm Collins: worse off and most women are worse off, but they appear to function. That is not true of the [00:09:00] men defect, women defect condition or the women defect condition.

This is something that always gets me when men laud men who go into these men defect women cooperate relationships, like, say, Andrew Tate, where they'll have, like, 5 or 6 different women that are supposedly producing their children, in that these scenarios actively hurt. Average and below average men, the very men who are often looking up to these individuals who are betraying them as much as they are betraying the women that they are in a relationship with.

To laud this behavior is to cuck yourself, Because ultimately this behavior, when normalized, cucks a large percentage of males in a society.

Let's go into men defect, women defect.

Simone Collins: Yes, as Arctotherium describes it, a defect defect society looks like the most primitive parts of sub Saharan Africa or the Amazon rainforest.

Women sleep around while adult men [00:10:00] prey on women and children and regularly kill each other for access to women. As men have multiple wives and wives are not loyal, there is no respite from intra sexual competition. You can always be replaced. And he includes a graph here

Malcolm Collins: among Himba of Southern Africa, the vast majority of married men and women have extra sexual pair partners and 48 percent of Children are not the husbands.

That is wildly high percent reporting extra pair partners. If you look at the 15 to 25 range for men, it's a hundred percent. For women, it's over 75%. So they're around 80 percent of the 26 to 35 range. Again, men, a hundred percent for women over 75% the 36 to 46 range men. over 75 percent women over 75%.

That is wild. During your entire reproductive life cycle. You are for around 75 percent of people sleeping with other partners

Simone Collins: when you're not incentivized to invest in the future, to think long term [00:11:00] as Arctotherium rights without paternal Certainty men have no investment in the future and spend their time fighting, dancing, or resting rather than working.

Economically, these societies are desperately poor and largely incapable of collective action. In war, they shatter like glass when faced with an enemy that expect chastity and fidelity from women. He shows a graph then of ethnicities and historic plow use, noting that defect defect societies tend to be ones without a history of plow and plow use pre 1500.

Plow agriculture requires male labor to sustain a family, which meant that groups that didn't enforce paternity certainly could not survive. Defect defect societies are reliably the poorest, most technologically backwards, and most violent. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. When, when, when It's almost like a tragedy of the commons issue of just like, why would I invest in anything?

Why would I not just try to take

Malcolm Collins: the commons issue? This is the issue of socialized land use. So [00:12:00] what a lot of people don't realize is one of the biggest problems with socialized land use, like the government giving you a property. And we saw this in a lot of communist countries is when people do not own a property, there is no advantage to improving that property.

Right. And so what you saw in these communist countries is that people's houses would fall apart. They would even like partially strip them of valuable materials themselves They became like dust piles really quickly Where in countries where they gave people houses to own and then potentially sell in the future what people did to those houses was?

Work to improve them because that improves their value. If you own property in the U S like even if you inherit it, even if you get it for free, you have a value in one maintaining and to improving that property. This is what we're seeing at the level of a family. If your family is like a net cost to you, like I know I'm going to be with my wife in 20 years or 30 years.

I have a reason to [00:13:00] work to both improve my relationship with her. If we're having some level of discord and to improve her as a human being, as a mother, as an employable asset in our society, et cetera, and you have a motivation to do that for me as well. In these other societies, there is no motivation.

Simone Collins: I really want to double click on this point when there's no reason to invest in the core thing that a human owns, their family, Then it makes sense to spend your life optimizing for in the moment recreation. And what are the forms of recreation that you can access with no accumulated resources? It's dancing, fighting, and resting. And that's why you see that so much in these societies.

And it's something we're beginning to see more within our own society as people become more sexually promiscuous and less stable in their relationships.

However, in our society, [00:14:00] because the resources needed to access different forms of recreation are lower, this can appear like playing lots of video games. I'd also note that this Tendency to invest in a family or, you know, a woman that you own or kids that you own is likely why there's a big boost to earnings both when a man is married and again when they have children.

Because men in those scenarios just have less motivation to rest and more motivation to invest.

Even in the cooperate defect where men would leave women. Those wives probably had very little incentive to invest in their husbands and help to build up their careers, probably knowing that their husbands would drop them, like, and in those

Malcolm Collins: societies that worked because women were largely unproductive.

Anyway, as economic assets. So it didn't matter that the husbands were [00:15:00] not attempting to improve them. One of those societies would likely be curb stomped by a modern, truly monogamous society. Yeah. Just technologically and economically if they went to war. But if that. Other society is captured by the woke mind virus or something like that.

It's irrelevant because they are just not going to like the, the bureaucracies are going to suffocate them.

So this is really interesting of how bad you get as a society when you hit a boast defect condition.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: intergenerationally speaking.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but let's get to the good, the good one. Men cooperate, women cooperate.

Arctotherium writes, the Western solution to the prisoner's dilemma can be summarized as follows. One, monogamy. Two, marriage by mutual consent. Three high standards of premarital chastity, especially for women and fidelity for divorce is difficult. The marriage contract can be created by mutual consent, but cannot be unilaterally dissolved.

And [00:16:00] five men materially support their wives and children. Let's deal with each pillar. In turn, Monogamy. Polygamy is a natural attractor state for humans since it satisfies the desires of powerful men to have multiple wives and the desires of women to have elite husbands. Monogamy requires both elite men and many women to sacrifice their desires.

In exchange, it provides strong checks on negative sum intersexual competition. Powerful married men are not constantly on the lookout for another wife and can devote their efforts to other pursuits, while less powerful men, who would be shut out of marriage in a polygamous society, have fewer evolutionary incentives to stab their compatriots in the back.

The result is a much more cohesive and powerful society, but it's not just male coordination that benefits from monogamy. As Joseph Heinrich in 2020 notes, it's Quote, because of how monogamous marriage influences social dynamics and cultural evolution, inhibiting female choice [00:17:00] by prohibiting women from freely choosing to marry men who are already married, results in both women and children doing better in the long run on average.

This occurs because of how the social dynamics unleashed by Polygyny influenced household formation, men's psychology, and husband's willingness to invest in their wives and children. End quote. Rather than invest in additional wives, men in monogamous societies invest in their original wife and children, with the result that almost everyone is better off.

Malcolm Collins: So this is what I was saying earlier and it's just a really important point when you quote unquote own your wife, you know, women are like Own your wife There is value or are they like?

Simone Collins: Own your wife

Malcolm Collins: Or or your wife owning you when it's a mutual state of ownership, which is what true monogamy is Oh, i'm, sorry.

This is so There was this song that was sent to us by one of our fans and it is like the worst. It's just a woman complaining and they got like big fans, everyone in the crowd.

Speaker 2: All day, every day, therapist, mother, [00:18:00] maid, nymph, then a virgin, guest, then a servant, just an appendage, lift to attend him, 24 7, baby machine, you make me do too much labor.

Malcolm Collins: And it's like, you cannot have a happy relationship if you don't want to do labor for your husband, because clearly you're describing a scenario where the husband is doing labor for you, like going out working, everything like that, but you are completely unappreciative of this.

When we are both appreciative if whatever relationship you decided works for you. And that's the thing that I think people miss when they try to go like trad was relationships and everything like that is they focus on the wrong parts of trad, they focus on husband does all the work in the factory or, or just whatever to bring home the money.

The wife stays at home, raises the kids. You don't really need to do things that way. There are other ways that things can be done. Lots of other historic ways that things can be done. As we mentioned, Sword and Shield relationships like the Vikings, where the wife manages the farm and does the stable source of [00:19:00] income, and the husband does the reward source of income.

Well, I think

Simone Collins: it's, again, it's more of a fantasy, this idea that the wife isn't Doing work aside from just cooking meals and raising the children, like managing, there's so much more than that. And also assisting a husband in his career is a big part of what I think many who are like people who are seen as housewives are doing.

Well, and that's what

Malcolm Collins: they said, you know, we did an episode on what people used to tell people to look for in a wife. So if you go to like the early Puritan period or something like that, they're always like, make sure your house can manage the household well and manage the servants well, and people hear that.

And they, they think that means like. Cook and clean. It's like, no, like if you look at what's, you know, Sam, Adam's wife is doing

Simone Collins: hiring procurement. They're doing HR. They're doing coaching. They're doing conflict management. They're doing is run the farm.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It means you are running the asset that is producing income.

for the family. That is what it means when they say be able to run the household. Well, that means while the husband is out in [00:20:00] Washington doing his politics stuff, the wife is running the farm, bringing in the income, selling the goods. This is not a woman who isn't productive. The point I'm making here is when you think about traditionalism Monogamy, or meaningful phonogamy, and we'll talk about what that means, is the actual part of traditionalism that works here, which means the husband and the wife persistently own each other.

And yeah, commit to each other. Just commit. Commit. Commit, commit. And I don't even think that this needs to be like, not that sexual or whatever. Like, I, there are some couples I know where the husband and wife are totally committed to others the other, and they have outside sexual relations sometimes.

And people can be like, how is that not breaking this? And it's like, it literally doesn't break any of this. Because what this is about is probability that the kids are the husbands or the wives. Is one partner going to leave the other partner in these scenarios? I'm thinking of that is [00:21:00] not a risk at all.

And so I think that people can misunderstand what the meaningful part of a traditional relationship is, which is owning your wife. And I want that to be clipped out of context. Because when it really is wife owning the husband as well, it is a permanent stake that creates a motivation for investment.

Simone Collins: Well then let's bring this back to reasonableness by pointing out his second pillar, marriage by mutual consent. He writes, this comes from Catholic doctrine, quote, What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder, unquote. And particularly benefits women who cannot be forcibly married against their will.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, but this guy has a huge bias here. There was another piece that we did where it was looking at you can check it out is Asian low fertility genetic. And we point out that if you look at Anglo Saxon courts going into the pre Christian period, there was a strong belief [00:22:00] that you should stay married to whoever you choose to marry.

So the idea of who you choose to marry existed in these territories. Okay. Okay. Pre Catholicism.

And a lot of Catholic areas actually had arranged marriages, as we know from like anyone who has studied royal history of that time period. So I don't like understand what they're going for. My understanding is that the Protestant areas actually had less arranged marriage or less pressured marriage than the Catholic areas.

But whatever the case may be, I don't know, remember

Simone Collins: the podcast we did looking at Scott Alexander's review of the book on the early rise of Christianity talked about how basically like empowering to women Christianity was, you know, it was like, be nice to your wife. Wives matter. Don't kill your children.

I don't know. I see this pretty Catholic to give women. Consent and

Malcolm Collins: avoid. No, but we're, we're talking here about do arranged marriages trump what the family would prefer. And if you're talking about noble arranged

Simone Collins: marriages involve [00:23:00] consent from women, I don't know why people think arranged marriages mean I'm going to force you to marry.

What he's talking about

Malcolm Collins: here is not that this line that he read from the Bible, because I know how this applies, what therefore God has joined together, let no man put us under is not. saying a woman can turn down a guy who her family has chosen for her. It's saying if a woman eloped without the family's knowledge, then she gets to marry that guy.

This is like the shotgun married line. This is not the women can turn down an arranged marriage line. And it was applied pretty liberally. So it did mean that basically you could within even Catholic countries, my understanding, largely speaking, If you wanted to get out of like an arranged marriage or what your family wanted to do, if you eloped with someone, that still counted as marriage.

Simone Collins: Well, okay, leaning back into the more traditional leanings of his five pillars. High standards of premarital chastity, especially for women and fidelity. This ensures two things. First, and most importantly, it ensures paternal certainty and minimizes sexual [00:24:00] jealousy. Second, it makes marriage the gateway to sex, which strongly encourages young people to get themselves into the long term pair bond that is the ideal environment to have and raise children.

Actually, you and I have been talking about this a lot recently, this, this argument that Uncontrolled sex drive is not actually the major driver of birth rates and prenatalism, but we, we, we have talked about the fact that like there are plenty of religions. I think the LDS church is a really good example of this presently that use marriage as the gateway to sex, forcing you to marry younger, which does help with fertility.

Malcolm Collins: It causes people to make. Catastrophically bad decisions about who they marry because they are marrying to gain access to sex and I think that just people need to be much like this This is one. I I actually pretty strongly disagree with i'm not saying that women should sleep around a lot before marriage I don't know because

Simone Collins: sleeping around before marriage also is a it's It's procrastination.[00:25:00]

It's distracting procrastination. Yeah, you should be focused on getting married. Yeah, it's

Malcolm Collins: distracting, I agree. But I think that's a very different motivation than what he's talking about here. Which is the way that some traditional systems used it.

Simone Collins: I mean, I think he's looking at it more from a male perspective, but also throughout the history of, like, Catholicism and Christianity.

It was just well known that men would sleep around a ton and then get married. Like, it didn't really count for men. So

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that is true. We, we, this expectation was from women and I, and there's an expectation. You know, and the way he's writing this here, he knows that he means for women.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But, I, I Well, he writes in parentheses, especially for women when it comes to premarital chastity.

He's explicit about that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I, I do not Think for the game theory as he has laid out. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but for the game series, he has laid out to maintain steady. So long as you have a security around paternity, I do not see this as that much of breaking the entire contract. [00:26:00]

Simone Collins: All right, he continues.

Divorce is difficult. The marriage contract can be created by mutual consent, but cannot be unilaterally dissolved. This allows for greater specialization of labor within the household and greater investment in, quote, relationship capital, end quote, including children. It also shifts the balance of power within the relationship to the more committed partner.

Oh. Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Do you, so this one gets really interesting because he goes into it a bit more and I had never thought of it this way. Is making divorce easy, fits the balance in the relationship to the less committed partner. When, when divorce is easier. Oh, because you can just

Simone Collins: walk away. But why would divorce being harder give more power to the person who's more committed?

Malcolm Collins: Because you're not giving it to the person who's less committed. Yeah, but the less committed

Simone Collins: person can just quiet quit. Like, that's true. I

Malcolm Collins: think, I think what he's thinking of here is he's more focused on his later argument about it, giving power to the less committed partner [00:27:00] when divorce is easier.

And the reality is you can just quiet quit in this situation. It doesn't give more power to the more committed partner. Like if you wanted to leave

Simone Collins: me, but you couldn't, you just be like, well, I'm just going to be a dick to you and I'm not going to help out with anything. And I could do the same. Right.

And that, that doesn't,

Malcolm Collins: it does, at least it does at least not make the situation harder. And I will note to the previous comment when I was like fidelity in women before marriage and I was like, I don't know if that's really necessary to maintain the bargain. Somebody might take that to mean like, oh, he's just justifying his wife slipping around.

Actually, Simone had only ever kissed one person other than me when we first met. Yeah, people are gross.

Simone Collins: I don't think people understand. Like I. I was just talking with Malcolm. I literally wouldn't be married if Malcolm didn't exist in the world. There is only one person in this world for me. I would be, not an incel, I would be an intentionally celibate, never interact with human kind of person.

Well, that's not helpful for people. I know it's not helpful, but I'm just Yeah, like I'm just to clear up anything. The point

Malcolm Collins: I'm [00:28:00] making here is this isn't cope. My wife actually did not, like, she did not sleep with anyone. She did not do anything more than kiss anyone else before meeting me. I am not saying this is cope for me.

And I slept around a lot beforehand. So this is like low male sexual fidelity. I'm just thinking about my own children and like if I told my kids to incredibly heavily discount any potential female partner. Now, I know it does increase the risk of divorce, but I think as soon as you say, I'm not dating women who have slept.

Around before marriage you have so wiped such a large portion of women off the pool in a modern dating market

Simone Collins: Unless you start early

Malcolm Collins: unless you start early. Yeah, but I mean you have got to start really early I think before you have a feeling of how this woman's gonna turn out I i'm really not pro marriage before like 19 I think you really need to reach that age for a woman

Simone Collins: Yeah, but Malcolm, look at the plummeting rates of sex.

The number, the percentage of women who actually haven't had [00:29:00] sex by we'll say age 25, 26 is actually increasing over time. And I, I, I'm not of this hopeless. Now. I'm also not of like it. I don't think that being a virgin is a prerequisite for a good marriage for anyone. And I think they're good arguments, especially for sex before marriage between people who have committed to each other because you kind of want to make sure you're sexually compatible.

I mean, it's not like the most important thing, but It kind of matters to me, like, I'd be really concerned about, you and I had sex once. We had

Malcolm Collins: sex before marriage.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So. But you, you being a San Franciscan, like far lefty when we met, it was not even like a question of if we were going to have sex.

You planned to use me for sex before marriage.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And then never married.

Malcolm Collins: To be

Simone Collins: fair, but yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That was the plan. She wanted you to try sex so she could say she done it and then live alone forever. That was, you, what you wanted to, I was a sex toy to this harlot who [00:30:00] seduced me with her pragmatism and diligence.

Anyway, keep going. Okay,

Simone Collins: where was I? Ah, yes. Okay. Men materially shush, shush, shush, shush. Men materially support their wives and children. They are not expected to provide for children that are not theirs, nor for children born outside of wedlock. If men do not have access to their children, they are not expected to support them unless they are personally at fault.

This should be seen as a contract between the prospective husband and wife. Like any reasonable contract, both parties are giving Something up and getting something in return. I, it seems reasonable.

Malcolm Collins: I wrong agree with the way this is worded here in divorce law and paternal support, which is, I think this another big problem with no fault divorce is a woman can leave a guy, then take the kids and expect.

Support for the children she had with him, which really messes up the dynamics of marriage. I think if a woman like [00:31:00] if a woman is at fault in a divorce, like she was cheating on the man or something, if she expects to have access to the children, the man does not need to pay her at you mean

Simone Collins: exclusive access.

Like if he doesn't get to be around the children, I think

Malcolm Collins: if it's like 50 50 paternity care, like, like childcare, she, she still doesn't get any child.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Well, yeah. If he's shouldering the burden and taking care of the kids. No, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: He's not shouldering the burden entirely. This guy is earning more.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. But okay. Yeah. But let's say that. He spends 10 days with the kids and then she spends 10 days with the kids. Then, yeah, no one needs to support anyone else. In

Malcolm Collins: a traditional divorce course, you understand, he still has to pay her. Really? Yes, he has to pay her if he earned more than her. So imagine she was a stay at home wife and he was out as a lawyer or something like that.

And then they get divorced. That's even in the absence of

Simone Collins: kids, though. That's different.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, it's not in the absence of kids because in the absence of kids, you're not paying child support.

Simone Collins: Okay. So this [00:32:00] isn't, you're not talking about alimony or also child support is still

Malcolm Collins: child support to the person who in the relationship earned less money, whether it's the man or the woman.

I didn't know that.

Simone Collins: Okay. Sorry. That's wild. Just when I think things couldn't get worse for men who. The point being

Malcolm Collins: is I am 100 percent pro child support in instances in which there is a no fault divorce, i. e. both people are just like, we don't get along anymore because that's required to maintain any sort of same contract where the man just doesn't leave a woman when she reaches too old in age.

And you need it whenever a man is at fault, the man was cheating. The man was doing something against the initial marriage contract. However, if the woman decides on the divorce and the man doesn't want it. Or if the woman, and she can't prove that he was beating her, she can't prove that he was cheating on her, she can't prove or worse, he can prove that she was doing those things to him.

No, no money, no child support because this [00:33:00] removes the incentive to live that kind of lifestyle, which hurts everyone in society.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it, it does, but I guess it also encourages less prudent marriage decisions when you feel like you can just get out of it, especially if you feel like you can get out of it and get money.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, so I was talking with this is at the Heritage Foundation and I was talking with a lawyer there who so this is a conservative community that he was talking about in California, right? And he was talking about how it became in the same way that like transgenderism swept through the community, like a trend more recently.

Do you remember talking about the path to divorce? Swept through the community like a trend and it was almost seen as sort of like low class to like not have an ex it was like well, oh like you're only on your

Simone Collins: first marriage, huh? It's a little

Malcolm Collins: pedestrian and low class to only be on your first marriage And the women would go to other women and be like, oh, yeah Don't you want to like, you know, you could leave him you can get all the money that he has right [00:34:00] now like And it actually worked as a sign of class because the men who were earning more wives felt like they could get more out of a divorce.

So it really was a signaling that the class status of the man, whether his wife had attempted to divorce him to be able to stay at home and do nothing and live off of like child supported alimony. That's a

Simone Collins: big deal. But yeah, a divorce catch. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: and it's like a long term this ended up terrible for the people who got like swept up in this trend No, but it was seen as like a trendy cool thing, especially if you do it amicably, right?

Simone Collins: I don't know. I I don't know financially supporting someone unless he was like these people were like Continuing to sleep with all of their ex wives. It was basically a harem if that's what is being described. I don't think No,

Malcolm Collins: but it's like now what you're missing is okay I've got an ex wife and i'm sleeping with 20 year old secretaries and stuff like that [00:35:00] because i'm super rich that's that's what was happening in these communities, you know, i'm i'm sleeping with my My kid's babysitter or whatever, right?

Like Look, these are not, these are not communities that you and I would consider high class, but we're talking about like LA nouveau riche, I could see how this could swipe, like flow through a community. And I was pointing out, and it's interesting in our age range, like if I look at our friends who are married, I don't know anyone who's divorced.

I don't know anyone in our friend group who's divorced. Oh

Simone Collins: yeah, good for our friends.

Malcolm Collins: And they're like, well, it's because you're young. This hits when you hit your early forties,

Simone Collins: I guess. Yeah. My friend's parents started getting divorced around like the fifth grade, you know, 10 11. And all of our kids are super young, so give it time, I guess.

We'll see. To be determined. Let's continue. So, he writes, Breaking the bargain. Pillars one [00:36:00] and two of the solution remain intact. Western countries are still formally monogamous and marriage is still by mutual consent. Though without any broad religious or philosophical justification, this may change.

Popular support for legalizing polygamy has surged in the 21st century U. S. But pillars three to five were systematically demolished by mid 20th century, mostly between 1916, 1980. Yeah. So here you see a

Malcolm Collins: graph and what this graph shows is the chronology of events in the women's rights movement in the U S.

He says, I include the scare quotes here because this movement should be seen as a zero sum struggle for political and economic power. Affirmative. He

Simone Collins: put women's rights. Yes,

Malcolm Collins: correctly included as a major achievement by Goblin. And if you look here, you see most of the major changes happened between 1965 and 19, let's say, 80.

[00:37:00] And then you see there were some after that, but the vast majority 1965 and 1980. So you're looking for things that happened post then. And this is where you see women just gaining a huge amount of power in society.

Simone Collins: Gosh, yeah. He writes, this is a chronology of laws because lies are laws are highly legible.

What matters is people's behavior. Sufficiently strong social norms are indistinguishable from laws and laws. Are interpreted by judges, meaning legal practice may change dramatically without any significant change to official statutes. That's true. The sexual revolution, there are, there no longer exists any expectation of chastity until marriage, but within marriage, there's still the expectation of fidelity.

Though without any enforcement mechanism beyond social stigma. To marry. Rather than a gateway to sexual opportunity, marriage has become a chain restricting it. He shows a graph of women's sexual [00:38:00] partners before their first marriage, from the 1970s to the 2010s.

He writes, Note that these numbers are lower than reality because they are self reported. When hooked up to a lie detector, women claim about one more sex partner than they do when asked normally. The graph shows that the number of women who have one partner before marriage has allegedly plummeted from a little over 40 percent in the 1970s to around 22 and a half percent in the 2010s.

Whereas four to five partners has increased from about 6 percent in the 1970s to about 28 percent in 2010. I think what

Malcolm Collins: people are missing here is how rare, even historically, virgin women were before married. And this is even when they might be lying, were in a historic context. If you look at the 1970s, it was only around 20 percent of women were virgins before marriage.

Yeah, this doesn't even

Simone Collins: show two partners,

Malcolm Collins: or sorry, zero partners. It doesn't show zero partners. It [00:39:00] does. It shows virgins before marriage. Well, virgins before marriage. Before marriage. Okay,

Simone Collins: I see. It's, it's literally

Malcolm Collins: the rarest, but they started

Simone Collins: out as 20 percent and now they're at like 5%. Oh, look at you, Malcolm.

I mean, not that I was, we were, you're a 5 percent or 5 percent married though. So I guess I would still

Malcolm Collins: count as in the 2010s. So we'd be maybe past then. I don't know. But the point is, is, Oh yeah, well no, I, I, I think that this is what it's asking. Like maybe the partner other than

Simone Collins: spouse probably is what they mean to be asking about.

But also it's notable as it having over 10 partners. Was maybe around two and a half percent of women in the 1970s, and it's up to about 20%, like 18%, almost 20% in, well, and then another,

Malcolm Collins: hold on, hold on. Another 20% is, is, is four to five partners. Yeah. And then another the 40%

Simone Collins: have had over four partners.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Which is. Well, no, no, no more because six to nine percent is at what is that like fourteen [00:40:00] percent? Oh lord. Yeah. Okay. Yeah Well, okay. Anyway, people are sleeping around more so he continues whereas the pre 70s dispensation aligned sex drives with pair bonding desired for raising children The present one sets them in conflict with each other.

Malcolm Collins: So I really want to pull this apart because I find this particularly interesting and I'm not denying that this is happening. I just don't know if realistically the way he wants to nudge culture is the only way to fix this or even the most realistic way to fix this. So the point that he's making here is marriage now constricts sexual access rather than gives sexual access.

So if I am a man . And I enjoy sleeping with lots of women. Now when I get married, I get less sexual access than I had before marriage.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Which I mean, I think for high value men, but only for high value men, cause no one else gets to sleep around. It does act as a disincentive to marry.

And here I'd note for anyone who [00:41:00] wants to be like, well, sex in marriage is more magical. You know, you can have better relationships with just one partner. And it's like, look, this might be true with women, but just statistically, this is obviously not true with men. If you look at the studies on this, men prefer variation in their sexual partners and the evolutionary reason why is really obvious because multiple women can carry your kids simultaneously as a man, of course, you're going to have.

preference for sleeping with a woman who is different from women who you have recently been sleeping with.

I say this because if the way that you are attempting to motivate a potential behavior is through lying to an individual, i. e. well, as a man, you're really better off just sleeping with one woman. That will be more pleasurable for you. , you will eventually fail if a person makes major life decisions around a false promise and then comes to realize that.

Malcolm Collins: It very much acts as a disincentive to marry. [00:42:00] And for women. It is the same thing. It is a disincentive to marry if they enjoy sleeping with lots of partners or if they enjoy sleeping with a high value partner, they couldn't get to marry them and is sleeping with other females, which is more likely. Now the question is are there other ways around this?

Outside of convincing all of young people to be more chaste because that seems like a very losing battle especially if I am talking to Like like let's be honest here if I am talking to me as a kid like this is what I try to imagine my kids as being and I was like Hey it's like better for society, man.

If like that girl, look, I know she's hot. I know she's willing to sleep with you, but like, don't sleep with her because like in a vague, like social sense, this is sort of better for the low value men. When she does marry, she'll be better. I'd be like, you can write off. This girl is down a [00:43:00] clown and I have access to her tonight and I may not have access to her tomorrow and you can.

Right off. Because how do you convince a young guy of this, right? Yeah. Or, oh my gosh you know, so it's really, really, really, really hard because you don't really have something big to offer them. Now, young woman, I can at least say, oh, you'll have access to better Partners for marriage. If you don't sleep around a lot now.

And then th