Why Female Leaders Abuse Their Power (The Science)

Dive into a provocative discussion with Malcolm and Simone Collins as they debunk two major myths: the idea that female-led societies are inherently peaceful, and the romanticized view of bonobos as gentle, utopian apes. Drawing from their book The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality and fresh data from studies (including 2024 research on bonobo aggression), they explore how matriarchal structures—both in history and among bonobos—often lead to more violence, coercion, and hierarchy than expected. From evolutionary psychology on women’s submission fantasies to historical queens waging wars, this episode challenges progressive narratives about “natural” societies and argues for building better futures through pragmatism, not nostalgia.

Key highlights:

* Why bonobo society is a nightmare of sexual coercion and aggression.

* Data showing female rulers are more likely to start wars (27% higher in historical Europe).

* Evolutionary insights into gender dynamics and power.

* A rant on rejecting “hidden utopias” and advancing civilization.

If you enjoy data-driven takes on culture, evolution, and society, subscribe for more episodes from Based Camp! Check out our books and join the conversation.Episode Transcript:

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be going over two persistent myths in society, dissecting them, looking at the actual data to show that no. One female led societies historically are, and actually in modern times because we’re gonna be going into new data, not just the old data that we had in our book, the Pragma Guide to Sexuality are, are more violent than non-female led society.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, sure, of course

Malcolm Collins: that makes sense. But also the myth of the peaceful bonobo is where we are going to start because Bonobo society is actually. Horrifying.

Simone Collins: I don’t understand why people have this vision of the Gentle Ape. All, all apes and monkeys terrify me more than Pelicans, and there’s nothing scarier than a pelican.

Malcolm Collins: So we’re just gonna go over a bunch of data, mostly drawing from a chapter from the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality about why. You shouldn’t let women run [00:01:00] things. And not just that, but how the progressive movement and the progressive part of the academic movement has this tendency to create these con conflation or confabulation of, unique examples or cherry picked data to try to say that we should go back to some earlier way of doing things or some earlier way is natural.

Simone Collins: Ah, the

Malcolm Collins: old sapien argument, fix it Dawn. Where they’re like, well, our ancestors were polyamorous. Look at the gentle bonobo. Look at the tribal they are. And I’m like, well.

First of all, that’s not true of all tribal groups, and it’s certainly not true of the more successful ones. You just chose one that fit the society that you wanted. You’re like, okay, where’s the most communist, the most matriarchal, the most? Okay. We will say, this is the model for early humans. Yeah. When that’s not actually the predominant evidence that we have, and we can do a separate episode on that.

But it’s the same with you know, with with [00:02:00] Bonobos. They go, oh, what, what? There was a period where like some researchers really romanticized Bonobos. And now we know that they basically made a mistake and they created, it is true that Bonobos do have a matriarchal society. It’s just not true that it’s a benevolent, matriarchal society.

So let’s go into this. All right.

Simone Collins: I wonder. Yeah, and I, I, I’m very curious to, to know when in history women were seen to be. Nice. I, I’m thinking maybe certainly with the Victorian era, this, there was this picture of like, the woman is being the moral anchor of the household, but yeah, I’m, this is gonna be fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: Some of our readers may be wondering at this point why we have not referred to Bonobos. It has become popular to cite Bonobo behavior as evidence that humans in their natural state would be free loving, polyamorous, matriarchal communities. This view of Bonobos has been aggressively pushed by those whose political agenda benefits from the belief that our distant ancestors lived in this kind of [00:03:00] utopia.

First, we would point to the fact that women tend towards submissive sexual fantasies much more than men. That this tendency does not appear to be socialized. And male humans almost certainly have an infanticide impulse. This serves as fairly concrete evidence indicating that early humans did not interact like Bonobos, or at least how people believe Bonobos interact.

Matriarchal utopias do not create evolutionary pressures, nudging women to become turned on by violence against themselves, or sexually aroused by men stomping on babies like lucy McGillicutty stomping in a great vat. A 2015 psychology study of 1000. This is not from the guide. I’m just sort of adding this for people who don’t know because in the guide I just citation, citation, citation, citation is, I’m just gonna go into some of this, right?

A 2015 Psychology Today Review of 1,516 participants found 52% of women fantasized about forced sex verse lower male rates for submission, often weekly [00:04:00] linked to implicit associations of sex with surrender rather than cultural norms. A 2006 sex role study confirmed women’s non-conscious sex submission link predicted lower arousal, if not acted on suggesting an innate component.

So I want pull out what both of those studies are saying. It’s saying that if a woman has a. Forced submission fetish, and she engages in vanilla sex. She will not become as aroused during that vanilla sex. As a woman. It’s not like it’s just an additive to her arousal. It is a necessary component of her arousal.

To reach a, a, a full arousal state. Mm-hmm. And, and in terms of this 52%, when you get to 52% of women fantasizing about forced sex, that means that it’s the normal thing to do. That means that, well, it’s not by a huge amount. It means that the women who don’t fantasize about this are the weird ones.

Simone Collins: It also just says something really sad about our evolutionary [00:05:00] history.

Throwing that out

Malcolm Collins: there. Yeah, it does. It does. It does because it there, I mean, clearly there was an evolutionary pressure to be turned on by that, right? Like

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Interestingly here, high resource women, eg. Executives report even more forceful submission fantasies as per a 2009 Journal of six research analysis.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: That is important to note.

The reason why we need to bring this up that a woman’s desire to be subjugated goes up as she reaches higher levels of status and power within society is that means if you put a woman at the top of an organization or say a country, she will have a desire for. Not just her, but everything associated with her to be subjugated as a result of that.

Now, obviously we don’t always act on our desires, and obviously not all women, right? You know, Margaret Thatcher was a goat leader, right? But it does mean that. [00:06:00] On average, you’re going to get this tendency, and I can think that this might be why a lot of women politically hold views that lead to a culture or a country to end up in a position of subjugation if they feel like they are overly lauded or overly high status within that culture or country three.

Malcolm Collins: And the reason I point all that out is

Simone Collins: the stronger your survival instinct perhaps.

Malcolm Collins: If we lived in a, like if the forces that shaped our arousal pathways

Simone Collins: mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Came from environmental pressures and those environmental pressures and those environmental structures looked like the imagined social se say it up of, of Bon Nobo, there would be no reason to see this pattern.

Yeah. So basically we know. Even if they were right about Bonobos they would not be right about us living in that.

Simone Collins: We don’t have a matriarchal evolutionary history

Malcolm Collins: Exactly.

Simone Collins: No, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: To continue further. [00:07:00] The concept of peaceful hypersexual, matriarchal, polyamorous, bonobo is complete pseudoscience motivated by political fringe groups read The Naked Bonobo.

For a more in-depth review of the scientific literature about this species, it bucks the mainstream narrative. Though it certainly has its own acts to grind, real bonobo behavior is far more interesting than the myth and no less a living nightmare than the situation we propose for early human social structures.

. Some examples here. There have been instances of female bonobos holding other females, infants, lives hostage in exchange for sex. Imagine a woman picking up an infant by the head and threatening to ring its neck unless it’s unpopular. Mother went down on her. This is a, a, a real and repeatedly observed phenomenon among Bonobos, so yes.

Women are in charge in the most [00:08:00] horrifying way you could conceivably imagine. I would point out that this is not a behavior that we have ever observed in male chimpanzees. So male chimpanzees when they’re in charge do not do this to other female chimpanzees. Infants in exchange for sexual favors, female bonobos Do.

Although, I will admit this is a bit of a cop out because male chimpanzees practice infanticide, so they wouldn’t be in a situation in which the female would have another male chimpanzees or an unpopular male chimpanzees kid, and they wanted sexual access to her.

Malcolm Collins: To go further here, but this isn’t in the book, but just to add some color. A 2018 study on infant handling at the University of Oregons Bon Nova Enclosure found that adolescents, females unquote, carry away infants after grooming. Mothers, sometimes leading to tent stands offs that escalate to threats if demands, including socio sexual ones aren’t met.

I love the way that that’s met. [00:09:00] Not they’re threatening their lives in exchange for se, for for sexual favors, so, so. Really quite a horrifying society and it shows that women, even when we’re talking about non-human women are significantly more sociopathic in the way that they will treat other people when they enter a position of power.

And I know this sucks. But it’s just the way things are. Like it’s, and, and, and we all know it. Like we can look at all these studies. I’ve, I’ve meant to prep an episode on this where we look at the instances where women tried to have, like, all female offices. Oh. And

Simone Collins: they,

Malcolm Collins: we’ve

Simone Collins: really gotta do that.

Eventually. I think you wanted me to do it. Because I would get really

Malcolm Collins: well, there was also a good study that looked into not, not just, it was, oh yeah, what percent of women want a female boss? And it was like, extremely low. It was like two to 3% or something, if I remember correctly.

So there was a Gallup poll conducted in 1953 that showed only 5% of women preferred a female boss. , If you look at more recent studies, in [00:10:00] 2013, only, , 27% of women. And in 2014, only 25% of women preferred a female boss. Although it’s been ticking up, , by 2017, it’s only 20. 8% of women. , So what you see is women really do not like working under other women , a, , in any sort of a context here.

Malcolm Collins: Like women intuitively understand that women will treat them worse.

They know everybody knows this, right? Like, but we’ve made up this fantasy about the type of rulers that women are because. It fits this weird power inversion thing that’s important within the urban monoculture or sort of like social inversion thing. So anyway. High ranking females will fight to increase the social status of their sons, but not for their daughters.

So even in a matriarchal society, women care less for their daughters than their sons, which I find to be very fascinating. And low ranking female Bonobos. Trade sex [00:11:00] for food while high ranking females never do. This implies that low ranking females do not particularly enjoy doing this.

IE they’re being forced to be prostitutes to eat. So we know people act like what they’re seeing in Bonobos is this culture of free love, right? Because they see them, you know, going down on each other and stuff, right?

Simone Collins: And everyone’s having fun. No. No,

Malcolm Collins: no,

Simone Collins: no. The

Malcolm Collins: high status females never do this, this see what they see

Simone Collins: is they, well, what’s, what’s also, I kind of implied beneath this, and it’s something that you and I talk about a lot, that, that sex isn’t really about pleasure after a certain point.

You know, it’s, it’s more about power. And or self-perception. And I kind of have a, a feeling like this is more how these female beone bows are ex exerting and communicating and confirming their level in the hierarchy. Like what else would you [00:12:00] force other members of your troop to do aside from performed sexual s What we

Malcolm Collins: don’t, we do not see this behavior in chimpanzees either.

So we essentially what Bonobos are. It’s, it’s like somebody walked into a group of humans and they go, oh, look at these women always like going down on other women and like sleeping together and stuff like this. What a, what a wonderful free love culture. And then you go and, and, and sit down and you notice all but one of the women is like sitting on the floor and you’re like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

What’s, what’s going on here? And she goes, oh, these are my sex slaves. What you just walked into was one woman. Was a bunch of sex slaves, not a culture of sexual freedom. Okay. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You as a leftist were not prime to see that, but that is functionally what was happening.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And these women who were the sex slaves did not want to be doing that.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: it was grape [00:13:00] as, as Epstein would say, Gar grape soda and cheese pizza. So to go further here lower ranking females trading sex for food, implying coercion in bonobo groups. Low status females engage in social sexual behaviors. Chy, genital genital rubbing. To access food controlled by higher ranking individuals.

While dominance rarely reciprocate, a 1994 esno study observes that young or immigrant females use sex to appease alphas for resources suggesting it’s not purely enjoyable, but a survival strategy in unique hierarchies. A 2021 scientific report. Of quote unquote biological markets in Bonobos confirmed that not swollen, low value females groom and offer sex to swollen high value ones for food access, following supply and demand dynamics.

Now, here’s where it gets even crazier than everything else I said there. So you could be like, well. As bad as things [00:14:00] are in Bonobo tribes, yes. All of the women might be sex slaves. Yes. You know, you might only have like one or two actual high status women in a society. And that, but at least we are trading male rule.

For less male violence, uhhuh, the problem is, is this is factually untrue. Male aggression rates in Bonobos are higher or equal to those among chimpanzees.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: so male aggression rates are equal to higher than chimpanzees. Contrary to peaceful stereotypes, male bonobos exist higher rates of intragroup aggression than male chimpanzees.

A 2024 current biology study comparing Coke. Ari Bonobos and Bombay Chimpanzees found Bonobo males engaged in 2.8 times more aggressive interactions overall, three times more Physical ones like pushing slash biting, though less lethal.

For the bonobo lovers out there, the rates are actually even [00:15:00] higher than we had thought originally. , Specifically a 2024 study in current biology showed that in Bonobo’s, , aggression was 2.8 x to three x more violent or more physical as they word it, than chimps.

Malcolm Collins: Aggressive Bay bonobo Males also achieve higher mating success similar to chimps Prairie 2023 PMC review.

So. Bonobos don’t just do sex more, but women also, female Bonobos are also turned on by the. Physically violent and aggressive male bonobos because they are having more sex with them. And this is something we see in chimps as well. And I’m sure we see in humans as well. This is, this is what women are looking for in a partner.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Now what is fascinating is that it does still appear that female bonobos, when they are in positions of power [00:16:00] within a tribe, are more turned on by acting dominant themselves towards especially other females. And this may make them more optimized for positions of power than human females. , IE If human females actually acted like Bonobos became very aggressive controlling monsters when they came into positions of power and didn’t want anyone else to subjugate them, then , it, we may have fewer externalities in our society from putting them in power, which ironically is exactly the opposite stereotype we have of Bonobos.

Malcolm Collins: Now as a caveat here, just like to give Bonobos one point, they have lower rates of lethal aggression.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: then ships. So good job.

Simone Collins: Yay. For not being total

Malcolm Collins: psychopaths.

Simone Collins: No, they’re total psychopaths. They’re total

Malcolm Collins: psychopaths.

Simone Collins: I mean, what is the point of emotionally and, and, and mentally torturing someone if they’re dead, you can’t.

Okay. [00:17:00]

Malcolm Collins: That is actually the bonobo mindset. Yeah. The

Simone Collins: bonobo

Malcolm Collins: clean.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I love that. I know. I, it, it’s really like they think that they’ve entered this society of like, equality just because a woman’s a top. And it reminds me of like, the thunderdome, like max. Road Warrior, road Warrior three where it’s, it is run by that woman who’s like very violent and aggressive, and that’s the way you should think of Bonobos.

They have a thunderdome where people fight with weapons. They have a, a, a female running it, but it’s not, not nice. All right. There is no perfect society out there hidden in the midst of our distant history. Enjoyed by some undiscovered tribe or orchestrated by another species of ape. People desperately want to believe that if they just travel far enough back and pull back that last bit of dense foliage, they will find like some sort of social El Dorado.

Some obvious and easy utopia. The pragmatists of the world know where our hidden utopia lies. [00:18:00] It is not lived out by some far away tribe. You’re described on a dusty tablet chiseled by our ancestors. Our ideal society lies in the future. We have the power to create optimal societies aren’t easy, they aren’t obvious, and they certainly aren’t about following some simplistic ideological doctor into the letter.

An enlightened society will be nuanced, slow to build and will need. To constantly experiment. Citizens of a truly perfect society must update their beliefs about the world as they try new things to see whether or not they fail. No one alive today knows how to create this glittering society. Not yet. The best anyone of our generation can hope for is to climb Mount Nebu and catch a glimpse of what we might be For now, we must be content with our lot as , one of the many diligent marching in the desert. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by the glittering idols. Simple, easy answers. Every day, we reap the reward of ancestors who suffered so that our species might [00:19:00] ascend from the total depravity of our primordial conditions and basal instincts.

We spit on their sacrifice by not doing. Our part to advance the flame of civilization because it is a flame which holds back the darkness both in the world and within ourselves. And then I have a, oh, sorry. We just blacked out there. Did we just go on a crazy rant? But you see, I was driven by madness and how stupid the concept was that there is some hidden perfect way of living, but let’s go beyond, the bonobo miss here. What happens when women rule an otherwise male dominated society? The real world scenarios in which this has happened, certainly deice stereotypes. You can see we were so much less biased back then. We really

Simone Collins: were

Malcolm Collins: a study investigating rulers between. 1480 and 1913 found Europe’s queens were 27% more likely to wage war according to economists or orian dub, NSP [00:20:00] Harish.

This is a fun, historical nugget. No, it probably doesn’t say anything innate about female rulers. I would change that now, but. Let’s hear my explanation from back then when I’m trying to hedge my bets.

Simone Collins: Yeah, let’s do this.

Malcolm Collins: . Queenly war mongering was. More likely a product of the societies in which Queens lived. When you break these stats down further for married versus unmarried queens, married queens appear far more likely to go to war, though unmarried queens had war declared on them more often. Interesting, interesting.

During period of history, a married queen could socially pressure her husband’s country to go to war with her two quote unquote. Protect her while other kings could not do the same with their wives. Countries easily making war slightly easier, and thus we’re tempting for women. So, you’re people who don’t understand what I’m saying there it was considered like if you took a husband from like the royal family.

If I’m a British and I take a. A son from the royal family of Germany to to, to be my husband. And now I, the [00:21:00] British Queen declare war on France. I can go to Germany and be like, oh, I’m just a womanly woman. I I need your help. Are you really gonna let your son get crushed by the Germans or by the French?

And they go, ah, I, I guess. But if you, if you marry their daughter, they’ll like, well, I married her to you ‘cause I thought you were strong. Like, I’m not gonna go to war with you. Right. So women basically got this cheat card for, for certain wars.

Simone Collins: My, my hunch when hearing you talk about it this time around was that women are, at that time and even now today, just don’t get that much firsthand exposure to combat.

Whereas men in positions of leadership are more likely to have at some point been exposed to combat, combat it firsthand. And so they just were more easily able to abstract it and not see just how tremendously horrific it can be.

Malcolm Collins: Maybe

Simone Collins: that must, I can’t not be a factor. The more removed you are from something, the easier it is for you to make sociopathic decisions about [00:22:00] it.

Malcolm Collins: Or you could just say that women are terrible because we’re gonna go to the

Simone Collins: next. Women are terrible. The alternate name for this podcast.

Malcolm Collins: Simone, you chose the bear. You chose the bear.

Simone Collins: God. Ah, no one will ever let me live this down.

Malcolm Collins: No, I love it. I love it. Anyway, and, and by the way, she didn’t choose the bear in the classic woman bear in the woods thing. It was when a bear had built a thing under a guy’s house. And she’s like, it’s just not trying hard enough. But the, she, I, I love that as like a, a slaying for an overly woke woman.

Like she chose the bear. She chose the bear. She chose the bear. Oh

Simone Collins: my god.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so a 2022 Forbes review of Global Leaders found 36% of female heads of state had initialized [00:23:00] military disputes versus only 30% of males.

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: So even today, women are more likely to start wars. A 2022 Conflict management and peace society study on rebel groups showed conflicts last longer when females are mobilized as fighters, as they enhance bargaining leverage and sustain war efforts.

Echoing how Queens leveraged alliances. So when women are fighting in war, it lasts longer. Medieval Chronicles, EG Saxo, grammatic Guested, Donna Moore admire warrior, Queens like vid, who led battles while preserving, quote unquote modesty, suggesting historical respect for female aggression without de feminization.

Simone Collins: Wait, sorry. In what way did she preserve modesty? I mean, everyone who’s not. Trying to die on a battlefield is wearing as much armor as they can. I mean, there’s gammon for example. It’s not modest [00:24:00] ‘cause I’m trying to cover up, it’s modest. ‘cause I don’t want someone to cut off my head with a sword. Right?

Like that’s the design of armor. I,

Malcolm Collins: I,

Simone Collins: I’m so confused. I think

Malcolm Collins: they were just impressed that she didn’t dress like a ma. When they say modesty, I think they mean not dressing in male armor and

Simone Collins: stuff like that. Oh. That she would like, I don’t know, rode side saddle or something. Which actually would pretty like a

Malcolm Collins: stern and like

Simone Collins: especially armor, a battlefield side saddle looks like it was really hard to do that.

People are doing jumps and stuff side saddle. Can you imagine? I can’t, I can’t stand a horse. First thing I ever did in a horse was fall off of it.

Malcolm Collins: If we wanna go back to Bonobos to learn a bit more about how they structure their societies.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So Bonoa societies are female dominated overall, but males inherit maternal ranks through pathy, staying in natal groups, allowing high status sons to outright some females.

A 2010 Max Plank Institute study found that. Matrilineal presence boosts sons dominance and mating success, [00:25:00] creating a linear male hierarchy where the top males, often the sons of alpha females can eclipse lower females. This contrast with chimpanzees where male coalitions dominate. And keep in mind the way that males keep power in chimpanzees is through coalition building among males.

Okay,

Simone Collins: so you wanna be a dragon woman, Nepo baby. Is that what I’m getting from this?

Malcolm Collins: Well, what you wanna be is the chimp. You want to understand that only through coalition building with other men can men maintain the higher spot within a hominid society.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: Bonobos keep men at the bottom by ensuring that men stay a strict hierarchy.

That really has no reason to make alliances among itself outside of, with the women, the, the high side of alpha women and stuff like that. High ranking females for owning sons of her daughters. Bonobo mothers invest heavily in sons social advancement, but not their daughters. As females immigrate to maturity while males stay.

A 2019 current biology study showed mothers intervene in [00:26:00] conflicts to elevate sons status, tripling their paternity success by guarding. Matings and forming coalitions against rivals behaviors absent from their daughters. This maternal bliss is linked to indirect fitness games as the sons produce more grandchildren.

Simone Collins: Aw.

Malcolm Collins: So you see it, it is useful for women to be nepotistic about their sons as Bonobos.

Simone Collins: As Bonobo Novos.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway that’s, that’s what I got to say about that. What, what are your thoughts on, on female led societies and why they’re so terrible?

Simone Collins: I mean, I think on, on the human level, ‘cause we talked a lot about Bonobos. I think there’s just a lot of evolutionary drives that women have that, I mean, we, we’ve talked in other episodes about how women are engaged in a lot of mait guarding behavior, for example. And, and, and tend to tear each other down.

Subconsciously, like it’s not intentional but that [00:27:00] there, there tends to be among female humans, a lot of. Make guarding behavior, or even within like, we’ll say a harem environment, you’re still competing for resources in favor and security. And so in the end, other women are just inherently a threat.

They’re a threat to your resources or they’re a threat to your access to high quality men. And so it’s really hard. To create an inclusive female environment where women aren’t even if, like logically and ideologically, they really want to be supportive of each other, where they’re not taking each other out.

And I think a lot of that is just downstream of. The instincts that were bred into women in societies where men were linchpins in, in resource provision, especially in those periods of human history where. [00:28:00] A very small number of men did most of the reproducing implying that women were like competing for the best men and also competing for the resources that those men had.

Does that make sense?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it does make sense. And I think if I was gonna say like, why you see, I mean, I think that there’s a lot of individual reasons why you see this, but I also think that the. Way that women resolve disputes works really well when they are in the submissive role, which is sort of aggressive.

Socializing, bickering, scheming.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It’s really bad if they’re in the dominant role.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I’m I mean, Catherine the Great did seem to do a really good job in her leadership position. Queen Elizabeth, I first famously successful in her leadership position. Queen Victoria was seen as a, a good leader, as was Queen Elizabeth ii. There, there are lots of. Great female leaders. Of course, then there’s, you know, bloody Mary who came right before [00:29:00] Queen Elizabeth.

I, Cleopatra was a hot mess for her country as much as she did a great job in the beginning. But it was more just by courting popularity among the common people and like actually pretending to be Egyptian instead of,

Malcolm Collins: it’s really only been a very small handful of, of good female leaders and England’s had a lot of ‘em.

If, if you look at other countries. Typically like when, when you have like female Egyptian Pharaohs, you’re like, oh, a dark age is about to come. Like, that’s, that’s the way it, it normally works. It just depends on, on what area, region you’re talking about. But I don’t think this is necessarily because of the females themselves.

I think it’s because most heavy, you know, hard cultures would prohibit a female leader and so. By the time you have a female leader get into power, you know that it’s already a very,

Simone Collins: yeah. This was Plan D. It was not plan A, B, or C. Yeah, yeah. There was that, and that was certainly the case with Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.

King Henry Thei tried so freaking hard. They were there the [00:30:00] whole time and he is like, no,

Malcolm Collins: no,

Simone Collins: no, no, no. It’s never gonna happen.

So we’re conflating two people here. , One was Mary Bloody Mary. , This was, , king Henry’s oldest daughter who was totally evil and just murdered tons and tons of people. , And then the other was Mary Queen of Scotts another evil Catholic, who Elizabeth locked up and tried to have her killed. On three separate occasions.

The reason she was even in England and needed to be locked up was because her, , well, so this guy murdered her husband and then she married him. And then she also wanted to kill a ton of people. , But that’s a whole other thing. So sorry here that we conflate the two evil Catholic Mary Queens of this period.

So if you are a Tudor Queen and you ever run into any Catholics named Mary, keep in mind they’re basically telling you, I.

Speaker 7: Nice to meet you, . Listen, if you ever need anybody murdered. Please give me a call and you, you’re [00:31:00] giving him card. No.

Code of ethics. I will kill anyone anywhere. Children, animals, old people, doesn’t matter. I just love killing

Speaker 6: you.

Simone Collins: But I’m, no, he had one of the

Malcolm Collins: worst queens in British history and one of the best.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s hard. It’s hard.

Malcolm Collins: It’s also interesting now that I’m just thinking about him and his daughters, the, the mothers the first one with his, his

Simone Collins: his brothers,

Malcolm Collins: right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The, the, the,

Simone Collins: his brother’s widow. But the marriage was annulled. She swore up and down that it was never consummated.

Malcolm Collins: The with the brother? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Catherine, the Spanish queen. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then she ends up having the, the evil daughter. , And, and Mary Queen of Scots was just a purely evil person.

Like if, if you read history she’s one of the most comically evil characters in all of history. She, [00:32:00] she like famously her sister who. You know, after she had put on these trials and just done, you know, hundreds of executions,

Simone Collins: well that, and that’s because a lot of people were, were using her.

I mean, a a lot of it had to do with misaligned incentives. When you are no a debit, you have to take out anyone who threatens your position.

Malcolm Collins: So after she was put in the, the Tower of London by Elizabeth. Mm. Elizabeth was like, look, I really don’t wanna have to kill you. I’m gonna try to give you the best life I can.

She then attempts to kill Elizabeth. In spite of that, Elizabeth again comes and says, stop trying to get me killed. I’m really trying my best to give you a good life here.

Simone Collins: No. The problem though was that there were lot, plenty of people who did not care really, whether Elizabeth died or not.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Mary was. Found organizing these plots.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But people were telling Mary that Elizabeth and her supporters were out to kill her.

Malcolm Collins: No, she, she was clear they could have killed her at any point. They obviously [00:33:00] just go and execute her When, when, after the second murder attempt. Right? Like they could have killed her at any point.

She was in the tower. There was no political fallout. It was purely a net negative for Elizabeth. It was purely an act of mercy to leave her alive. But Mary. Was just incapable of not trying to take the most evil choice with every single thing that she chose in her entire life. Evil maxing, that’s, that’s we joke about, but,

Simone Collins: I feel bad for

Malcolm Collins: her. And it’s weird to think that that Elizabeth’s mother was seen as, as, as like the more cunning and evil one, and Mary’s mother was seen as the like finder, more witness one. But I think that’s part of what led Mary to become so evil is she was very easy for the people around her to manipulate and Elizabeth was not.

So

Simone Collins: well, yeah. Plus you kind of had like a Nepo baby family versus a very, very cunning.

Malcolm Collins: Of [00:34:00] certain

Simone Collins: family. Yeah. Sociopathic, mercenary family, you know, like this, this was this, that family had clawed their way into influence versus a, you know. Catherine had just married into it and had not, not only, you know, connections at, at the height of power in her own home country, but also with the papacy.

So, you know, she was extremely privileged and didn’t have to be good. In fact, she never even really learned proper English. You can see from her spelling in her letters that she still pronounced things with a really bad accent throughout her life because she would just spell his up phonetically.

Malcolm Collins: Even if you are a Catholic, you should hate her because if she had just had grace and told her family members to get the annulment for the king,

Simone Collins: yeah, she

Malcolm Collins: could have lived out her life in luxury,

Simone Collins: in true luxury. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But she refused

Simone Collins: and she had such a good go of it. And she was also just having all these miscarriages.

Like if I were her person, I’d be like, yeah. [00:35:00] And also like, I’d be grossed out by the fact that my husband was sleeping with all these other women and like clearly wanted to end. Like, if, if you wanted to end your marriage with me and you’re clearly trying, I would be like, well, yeah, like if you love someone, let them go.

I don’t want to, like, I, I do not wanna be a ball and chain. I don’t know what kind of woman wants to be. I don’t know what her game was. It, it was, it was very stubborn. And that’s. And so, yeah. Not, not great. Not great.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Not, not great. But just to think if she had just not been such a prick, the, the Protestant movement might have just died out.

Simone Collins: My God. You’re right. Yeah. That is, that is really something. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But to be too arrogant to learn the local language and just, come on, come on. She was always gonna be that way. She was always gonna be a nightmare.

Simone Collins: God, that cathedral in St. Andrew’s then probably could still be standing. Right?

There’s so many gorgeous cathedrals in the UK that would not be

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But we probably would’ve never had the alignment.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I mean a lot of [00:36:00] conservatives these days, like I should do a video that the Enlightenment was a very good thing. It was the enlightenment was like the idea that like our problems, our wokeness problems stem from the Enlightenment is a IOP on people.

Mm-hmm. Like, the enlightenment was everything that we need to return to. It is what we lost. With wokeness, it was wind Civilization made a major jump forward.

Simone Collins: Yeah. The, the enlightenment was gentleman scientists. The, the enlightenment was tech pro accelerationism of its time. Yeah. It was not, it was not what people Yeah, it was not woke.

Wokeness is the esoteric hermeticism of. Of our time, and you’re,

Malcolm Collins: you’re absolutely right. Woke is, in a way, a sort of mystical framework.

Simone Collins: It would sort of, it is a mystical framework. It is based on feelings. It is based on what you wish were true. Whereas the enlightenment. Is a, a very like we can work [00:37:00] this out.

We can reason this. It, it’s, it’s very masculine at its core, not feminine. And I mean that’s, we, you know, in our episode about peacocking that sadly bombed, the reason why men stopped dressing in a very fanciful manner was also due to the enlightenment. It was because they became focused more on form than.

Sorry, on function then form. Yeah. And that’s why suddenly clothing wasn’t like, you know, it was like we, we dropped the lace, we dropped the buttons, we dropped the frills, we dropped the, the man dresses and the heels and we got to work. And that’s awesome

Malcolm Collins: that, that actually a good episode is how the enlightenment created masculinity, because before that, men, you know, dressed very eff

Simone Collins: Oh yeah.

No, even, even military dress was.

Malcolm Collins: Was very what today we think of as, as, as

Simone Collins: well, literally the CT was, was modified for, what was it? Like Otto, an Ottoman military uniform. Like all of the super fancy [00:38:00] stuff was, was the heel, like I was saying, the high heel was taken. From, what was it? Persian warriors who, who rode on a horseback and needed the heel to, to be able to stand up and do archery from stirrups on a horse while moving.

Like all of the stuff that is fru fashion came from military, military dress. Was fabulous.

Malcolm Collins: So, and also, and the enlightenment was when some guys were like, well, I mean, shouldn’t masculinity be more about like stoicism and not wasting money and, you know, focusing on things that actually matter for civilization?

And then you had the colonization period during the enlightenment.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which was huge as well. And that was when you did the good colonization, not just the exploitative type, you know, nation building in other countries. And

Simone Collins: yeah, no, it, it was, it was, it was. Space, space style, final frontier colonization.

It was, we are going to go to the unknown lands. I mean, of course any leftist is gonna be like, are you kidding me? The Americas were fully populated with indigenous Americans. It’s not [00:39:00] the unknown open frontier

Malcolm Collins: which is, I get it. I mean, not exactly true. The, the, the diseases that the Europeans did not mean to bring over with them had mostly wiped out.

Most of the American population at that point? It

Simone Collins: was, oh, so they were already,

Malcolm Collins: it was heavily depopulated,

Simone Collins: decimated, I wanna say decimated. Were they more than decimated?

Malcolm Collins: If I remember correctly,

Simone Collins: I don’t, I don’t actually know, like, how much I

Malcolm Collins: wanna say it was just 98%.

Simone Collins: Wow. Also, decimation as a practice make any, do you understand the reasoning behind it? Why would you kill 10% of your troops even if they were naughty?

That doesn’t make like you need them unless they were too, too expensive to feed and you were just trying to like save money while also putting them in line. Do you understand the reasoning and behind decimation?

Malcolm Collins: So I, I mean obviously it’s, it’s a punitive thing. It’s so that you and everybody understands what it means to failure.

To fail in an instance or in a, in a case where failure rates could be extremely [00:40:00] high. So, it, yeah, it says here,

Simone Collins: okay, so you as a general would decimate your troops when they behaved really poorly because you knew that basically if they didn’t shape up, you probably lose like 50% of them in your next style anyway.

Well, that’s the way

Malcolm Collins: things were historically. If, if, if a route happened, everyone died.

Simone Collins: Okay. So yeah, better to, to lose 10% and scare ‘em straight than to lose 90% next time you go to battle. That’s the

Malcolm Collins: reason. Yeah. So it says, the commonly cited figure is that diseases killed approximately 90% of the Native American population.

Over the centuries following contact with some sources specifying up to 95% in certain regions or overall. So yeah, a, a and then, yeah. Yep. So 90 to 95% it was, it was com It wasn’t decimation. It was the decimation is what was left.

Simone Collins: Yeah. My God. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: that’s so, so, yeah, America was, I, I, I

Simone Collins: know you didn’t mean to,

Malcolm Collins: not a, a pleasant thing to say, but and it’s one of the things that I also almost wanna do an episode on is there have been various times in human history where a group has lived through a post apocalypse.

[00:41:00] Yeah. And we. Yeah, as we were expanding in the, in the west and in the Americas the, the native populations that we were encountering from their perspective, were living in a post-apocalyptic world.

Simone Collins: That’s crazy.

Malcolm Collins: Their entire, like, when we talk about how Savage many of them were, I mean,

Simone Collins: well, yeah, it sounds kind of, yeah, it was very road warrior, right?

It was like, we’re just gonna raid other groups. And they were

Malcolm Collins: acting like Road Warrior Raiders because they were living in a post apocalypse. Damn. There was still like one or two peaceful settlement, not like one or two, but there were, there were like. I’d say it seems, I, I don’t, I don’t know. I wanna say like

Simone Collins: no.

Well, the, the peaceful ones I learned about, I learned about in school in California, like the Elone because, I don’t know, like maybe in the Western context,

Malcolm Collins: the Cherokee were the ones who got screwed over the most. They were, they were fairly peaceful, westernized.

So there, there were, there were some.

Peaceful Indians. But, but a lot of, oh,

Simone Collins: someone told me recently someone I think, who listens to this podcast that the Inuit or above Repopulation rate, by the way.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, wow. Yeah. The and, and so much of Native American history, we totally have to do a video on, on Native [00:42:00] Americans. Like you’re, you’re just told lies like the the whole, if you’ve been told the story about the giving or thinking about giving infected blankets to Native Americans,

Simone Collins: oh

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

What is fake

Simone Collins: news?

Malcolm Collins: Not. Told about that story is the city was under siege.

There were women and children in the city. That very group of Native Americans had wiped out women and children in other cities. They had siege. Mm um, like they, they were in an existential fight for their lives. And the Native Americans were regularly committing war crimes.

Like anybody who wasn’t stupid would’ve done the the infected blankets routine there.

By the way, if you’re like, well, the Indians were being massed and that’s why they attacked the fort. No, no, no, no. That wasn’t why the Indians attacked the fort. They attacked the fort because they stopped getting random gifts for context on what caused Potomacs war. After the British defeated the French in 1