#95 Christopher Ryan - Love, Lust, and Evolution

0 (0s): I think one of the big problems that we have is that men think women think like men. And women think that men think like women. And of course we think very differently. Like the things we're into are very different and men can't imagine what it's like to have a sense of smell that's 20 times stronger and be sort of attracted and repulsed by things that we can't even sense, you know? 2 (28s): Hello everybody. You are listening or watching Chatting with Candace. I'm your host Candice Horbacz. Before we go into the episode, we're gonna do what we always do. We're gonna do our coffee shout outs. I wanna say a big thank you to Roger. Once again, you are a repeat donor. Thank you so very much. Same for you, Keith Ray Rosado. Wow, that's a lot of coffee. I could not do this without you. All of the resources go right back into the podcast. So thank you so very much. If you want to help support the podcast, you can check the sponsors affiliates below, or you can go to Chatting with candace.com. There's a link for Buy Me a Coffee as well as Patreon. Patreon. You get early access to episodes and you get to also know who's coming on in the future and submit some questions. 2 (1m 12s): So that is a lot of fun. Like I said, the reviews have been working. We were charting last week. Hopefully we still are this week. Thank you so much for everyone who is leaving. A comment, five star review, that helps a ton. This week we have the one and only Christopher Ryan joining the podcast. I was actually trying to get him on probably two years ago. Timing didn't work out and then he kind of was brought back into the front of my mind through some other interactions and I was like, how did I not have Chris? Chris, Sonya, he's right up my alley. His book Sex at Dawn is revolutionary. I love all of his work. He also has a really great book called Civilized to Death. 2 (1m 52s): He is the host of Tangentially speaking, his podcast. This conversation does not disappoint. We get into, I guess, the Evolution of humans and our sexuality and where we were Wired for monogamy or something else. And the associations with open sexuality and violence, it gets really interesting. He brings an amazing novel perspective and I hope that you enjoy the conversation. Please help me welcome Christopher Ryan. Chris, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I'm so excited that we actually made this happen. And I feel like when I was originally trying to schedule that, it was probably premature because I just got back from this fit for service trip with my husband and Kyle Kingsbury had a talk there and he mentioned a lot of your work and there's all these people that are taking notes vigorously on, on I guess like ways to have a, an unconventional relationship. 2 (2m 51s): And I'm just sitting there kind of chuckling because I guess my background with open relationships and open marriage and I just see all these people that kind of have that initial spark of curiosity and I'm like, you have no idea what you guys are getting into. But it's not as easy as maybe like this, this little like room is making it seem. But I think that it's cool to be in this place where it seems like a lot more people are open to unconventional relationships. And your work, especially with Sex at Dawn, has been immensely powerful for me and I'm sure a lot of other people. 0 (3m 24s): Great. Well thank you for having me. And yeah, shout out to Kyle Kingsbury. Nobody looks better in their underwear than Kyle Kingsbury. I, I don't know if he was prancing around in his undies, but I've, I've seen Kyle probably more in Speedo or underwear than, than conventionally clothed. For some reason 2 (3m 48s): He's never fully dressed. And I honestly think it's probably some of the following for fit for service because people just wanna go to admire him. Like he just looks like a God. He is just like chiseled out of something that is not flesh. I don't know what it is. So yeah, good for him and good for his wife, 0 (4m 4s): But he seems very chill too. He's, he's not a, you know, a hard body macho dude. He's, he is super gentle and sweet and you know, he's a lovely guy. Yeah, if I had a body like that, I wouldn't put my shirt on either. What the hell, 2 (4m 19s): No, of course not. I would peacock all day and be like, look at all of this hard work and sacrifice, isn't it glorious? 0 (4m 25s): Well, and genetics, let's be honest. Yeah. For, for a lot of that stuff's free for 2 (4m 29s): Sure. Absolutely. When I was, so I usually journal and I do like as deep of a dive as I can before I have someone on, so I can feel super prepared. And what I see the most pop up when it comes to your work, or you in general is like this Mass triggering of people when it comes to their relationship with jealousy. And I've always thought that jealousy is so interesting in our cul our culture because we want to regulate all of our other emotions, whether it's anger, you don't wanna just like go punch someone in the face because you aren't regulated. But when it comes to jealousy, it seems like it's one of the only ones that can be left unbridled. And I'm just like curious why, I guess why is it still here? 2 (5m 13s): 'cause we have all of these fitness payoffs, so jealousy is there for a reason, and does that go against the potential idea that we are not Wired for monogamy? 0 (5m 23s): Well, I'd question the premise a little bit. Just because something exists doesn't mean it's there for a reason in terms of evolutionary theory, right? You know, there's no good reason for multiple sclerosis or cancer or, you know, stroke or any of these other things. So many things exist both in the physical and the psychological realm that don't necessarily fulfill an evolutionary purpose in, I I think you make a really interesting point though, that jealousy seems to be exceptional in the sense that there's a, a sort of widely accepted view that if you have a reason to be jealous, then there's a justification for whatever ridiculous behavior results from that. 0 (6m 14s): You know? And in some countries, crimes of passion are still, you know, that's still considered a legal defense, right? You know, my wife fucked someone else, I killed them. Well, you know, you get it right, judge. Yeah, yeah. You know, like in Italy, I think it's still considered a legal defense. Oh god, from my perspective, jealousy is an expression of insecurity. Right? And I think, you know, circling around to the way you phrased the question, I do think that insecurity fulfills some sort of evolutionary function. So, you know, on a very basic general level, you know, you look at a cat lying in the sun in, in the window, and another cat comes along and wants to push that cat out and take its spot, and then there's a little fight there, right? 0 (7m 3s): Well, it's certainly natural for us to want to keep something that we value not to lose it. I think that our ancestors learned that the best way to keep things of value was to share them. And we live in a society that tells us that the best way to keep things of value is to jealously guard them. So, you know, this jealousy as a response to potentially threatening sexual partners or attraction is very much a culturally mitigated response. 0 (7m 45s): And I think the central argument of Sex at Dawn was to look at the anthropological and primatological and physiological evidence and say, well, this impulse of wanting to protect what we value that is natural. That is a universal human trait, even a universal mammalian trait, possibly, you know, it extends into insects and, and all living things, I don't know. But certainly among mammals, that's a universal trait. Now, how that manifests is culturally mitigated. And our culture, as I said, teaches us, you know, say for a rainy day, don't throw good money after bad, you know, don't take care of strangers. 0 (8m 31s): It's a, it's a waste of money. Invest your resources very carefully and, you know, but other cultures that exist right now see things very differently. You know, my my ex-wife and co-author of Sex at Dawn Silda grew up in Mozambique. And when we were working on the book, she reminded me of an expression she had heard a lot growing up, which is that the best place to store extra food is in your friend's stomach Right now. That's a culture that has no refrigeration, you know, at least not much in, in the villages in Mozambique. And obviously our ancestors didn't have refrigeration, so there wasn't an option of storing food in a deep freezer, you know, for a rainy day or a day when you didn't have any food. 0 (9m 22s): So what did you do? You shared food with the people around you, and when they have extra food, they share it with you. so it makes perfect sense in that kind of society, right? And then you move into our society with technology and refrigeration. Obviously this is a metaphor for much deeper things, but you can see how different even economic contexts would shape the same impulse in very different ways. 2 (9m 53s): So I guess when it comes to facing your jealousy and overcoming it, this is a question I get a lot from people and it's very hard for me to articulate, but like, how do you go about Reframing or integrating that into a more healthy version of, you know, protecting what is valuable or cherishing what is valuable, but not looking at relationships of a means of possessiveness or competition or ownership? 0 (10m 23s): Well, I think that a healthy dose of humility is important, right? Like a lot of people say, well, you know, if if I let my partner be attracted to other people and express that openly, then I, then I might lose them. The premise is totally wrong there. you might lose them anyway, right? So let's just start with some reality here, which is that nobody controls anyone else. You know, if your partner wants to leave you, they're gonna leave you unless you've, you know, got them in a cage in the basement, you know, like Beyond, that kind of thing. 0 (11m 6s): Yeah. Beyond like serious criminal behavior, there's no way that you are gonna control another human's decisions. So let's start there and say, okay, there's always a risk that your partner's gonna leave you. Now what do we do? Is it safer and smarter and more ethical to acknowledge the reality of your partner's consciousness, your partner's autonomy, your partner's biological reality, and your own, and start from that. Or is it a smarter strategy to just pretend none of this is happening and ignore the problem, right? 0 (11m 54s): So is it smarter to go to the doctor and get checked up when you've got some pain? Or is it smarter to just say, no, I'm gonna ignore the pain and it'll go away? Well, obviously we know it's smarter to get it checked, right? It's smarter to face your problems, to face your insecurities. That's definitely a better, you know, if there's water coming through the roof, do you ignore it? Or do you go fix the roof? You take a look at the roof. So in every other area of life, we acknowledge that we should be looking at the possibility and, and always be cognizant of the possibility of problems and address those problems when we see them, except in relationships where a lot of people say, no, no, my strategy is to pretend everything's awesome, to hide my own reality, to lie about my own desires, my own feelings, my own discontent, whatever it is, my own fantasies. 0 (12m 51s): And then everything will be great. Well, that's a really stupid approach to life in general. And relationships specifically. 2 (12m 59s): No, I, I am 100% agree. And it's interesting because I feel the more control and this kind of invisible leash that you put on your partner, it's kind of creating a false relation, like a false projection of the relationship. Like it only exists perfectly in this vacuum, but if you were to actually allow it to behave in such a way that it's just going to organically, then again, like that fear comes in or that loss or abandonment or whatever it is. So it's like by the more, the more we're both kind of pretending at this thing, the more it's further away from what it actually is 0 (13m 34s): And, and, and can't go anywhere, right? Because if you are not showing your true self to your partner, what does it mean when he or she says I, Love, You. Exactly. What does that mean? They don't know you. So what do they love? They love some weird charade that you're playing for them, right? They love this highly edited, very filtered shaped to what you think they want to hear kind of view of you. That's not you, right? So if you put yourself in that position, you cannot receive love from anyone because you're not letting anyone see you. So it's, and 2 (14m 13s): It's not Loving yourself either. 0 (14m 14s): Exactly. Exactly. Because it's all based on shame. I remember one time shortly after Sex at Dawn came out, I was in Australia, and I remember I was, I'd come down to the lobby of the hotel to, to do an interview with somebody, and I was sitting there waiting for this journalist to show up, and it was this big lobby, you know, hundreds of people walking around. And I saw this really sexy woman walking through the lobby, and I was watching her walk across, and, you know, all these people are sort of checking her out. And there's this couple, like, sort of opposite side of the room from me, me. So I, I, they came into my view and it was so funny because I could see the dude definitely saw the woman walking across pretended he didn't, the wife saw the woman, saw the guy see her, saw the guy pretending he didn't see her. 0 (15m 8s): And it was just like, this is so layered and complex, this festival of fucking nonsense here. Like what would've been the problem to just say, wow, sexy woman walking across the lobby? You know, like, what is the problem there? It's, it's like, like I could not be in a relationship with a woman who was trying to force me to pretend not to notice women. It's like, oh, am I allowed to look at the sunset? You know, am I allowed to notice the stars in the sky? What the fuck are we doing here? It's ridiculous. 2 (15m 42s): I couldn't agree more. It's like, you like a Picasso, so you better not fucking like a Van Gogh. Like, you have to suddenly pretend that beauty only exists in one channel and one channel alone. And again, it's, it's going at your relationship just from a foundation of bullshit, a foundation of lies. And is that how vulnerable and fragile you want that relationship to be? Whereas if it's tested at that very, at that floor level of just appreciating a beautiful woman walking across the room, that all of a sudden your relationship is in shambles, that makes zero sense to me. It's almost like you're creating that abandonment that you're trying to avoid. 0 (16m 15s): Precisely, precisely. I, yeah, I mean, I think we do that all the time. And, and getting back to the other examples, like, you know, if your car is making a weird noise and you refuse to go to a mechanic because you think that'll make the noise go away. Like, we recognize that that's a ridiculous way to approach auto repair, right? But for some reason, we do that in relationships and think it's gonna work. And if it works, all it means is that you end up in a relationship with no love, no respect, no reality, no sincerity, no authenticity, okay, but you didn't get divorced. Congratulations. You know, is that success? 2 (16m 57s): Yeah. I think a lot of people are willing to sacrifice their authentic selves or their authentic desires for that attachment. So it's, it's this fear that if I'm expressing myself to the fullest of my capability, that there's no way I'm gonna be able to find a, an accurate match. The things I want are just too much of an outlier, which I think is interesting because there's a new, there was new study that said that over 30% of millennials have been in some kind of open relationship or poly relationship. That's a huge number, and it's probably higher. That's just the people that said yes. So you might think that the things that you want out of a relationship are way out there, and you're never going to attract someone that wants it. But I would say you can kind of self-author your story and create the reality that you want. 2 (17m 38s): You just have to do that with conviction. 0 (17m 41s): Yeah. I think a lot of people have been in open relationships without knowing it, right? If your partner's cheating on you. Yeah. You know, my own experience, long before I wrote Sex at Dawn or, or did my dissertation, which was the basis for Sex at Dawn, I sort of had this, this pivotal realization in my early thirties that I personally was not sexually monogamous, and that the relationships that I had had up until that point in my twenties that were, you know, sort of objectively the women were fantastic. 0 (18m 26s): You know, there was, there was nothing that I could point to in the women that was a problem, but I found like I was discontent and restless and, you know, there's, and I would start looking for problems in the women. And, oh, I'm, I'm not happy because she's not funny enough, or she's this or she's that. And I remember I was with a friend in San Francisco in a bar in the lower hay called Todo. I remember exactly where we were. And, and I was complaining about the woman I was living with at the time, who, who was like, you know, gorgeous, funny, hilarious, just smart, self-deprecating, like just awesome, just an awesome woman. 0 (19m 13s): And I was complaining about something and my friend sort of reached over and touched me on the chest, which wasn't his style at all. And he just interrupted me. And he said, Chris, dude, I, Love You, but I can't listen to this. She's the most amazing woman I've ever been in a room with. I can't listen to you complain about her. And I remember suddenly seeing how ugly I was that I was like a, a millionaire complaining about taxes, you know, to this guy who was just trying to pay the rent. And that really struck me, and it, it sort of launched me into a lot of self-reflection that led me to this understanding that like, the problem isn't hert the problem is that I love women too much to, to just hand in my passport and say, I'll never be with anyone else. 0 (20m 13s): I'll never go anywhere else. I'll never experience anything with anyone else. I can't do that. That makes me feel really restless and crazy. And I'm blaming her, and it's not her fault. It's the fault of the structure. And, and so I sort of, you know, came to this, it was almost like realizing I was gay at 30 or whatever I was, it was like, oh, that explains it. Like, that's why I haven't been happy, you know? And I thought that what that meant was that no woman would ever want to have a serious relationship with me again, because as you said, like what I want is too out there. And so I should, you know, hide that and, and sort of try to finesse things and not be totally honest. 0 (20m 56s): But, you know, I was like, I can't live that way. I'd rather be alone the rest of my life and, and be honest. And so I started, this was also around the time I started working on my dissertation, which was on human sexual behavior and prehistory, because these things converged in my mind, right? I wanted to understand like, wait, why am I this way? Is this, I have some kind of a Freudian hangup from my childhood, or what's going on here? Anyway, so then when I started meeting people, you know, the first conversation would be, you know, she'd say, what are you doing? I'd say, oh, I'm working on a PhD in psychology. What's it about? It's about how humans aren't actually monogamous by nature. 0 (21m 37s): Right? And that would lead us into a very interesting conversation. And about half the women were like, okay, dude, that's great, but not interested. And, you know, but the other half were super interested. And they were, they were really, you know, impressed by my authenticity. And so what I learned was that there are so many more people out there who are, what they're looking for is authenticity. They're not that concerned with exactly what you have to say, it's that you're saying it honestly, and you're speaking from the heart. 0 (22m 20s): And I think especially women are really tired of men who are trying to play them and trying to sort of like, you know, be the cool guy who like plays all these weird games that they think women are into. When I think most women, at least women of quality, in my experience, what they're into is reality. And so if you say to a woman, look, I'm in, I'm, I really love women and I'm not gonna pretend I don't notice when a beautiful woman walks through the room. And you know, you're either down with that or you're not. Most women are like, wow, an honest guy, finally an honest guy. 0 (23m 1s): And that actually leads them to feel more secure, not insecure, because they know this guy's being honest and this guy's not gonna shape stuff to try to please her. He's gonna be who he is. So if he says he loves her, he fucking loves her. If he says she's beautiful, she's beautiful. He's not saying that to try to get something. I think men need to learn that lesson. And it's really hard these days 'cause they're not, they don't have enough older men telling them the truth about this stuff. 2 (23m 33s): No, they don't. I, the role models that you see that are getting the most traction sometimes are infuriating to me, just infuriating. It's this Alpha bro, you know, puritanical movement that's happening. And it's almost go, it's going backwards a lot. And the immediate feedback to any kind of conversation like this is, well, he must be a cook, or he must be a Beta, like a Beta behavior. And I'm like, I don't know anything more Alpha or self-actualized than an authentic man, than an honest man, than a man that is like, you can still be the leader of, you know, your family or of your partner, or like, it doesn't take away from your masculinity, if anything, I think it's an honest enhancement of it to pretend again that like all your vision is somehow affected once you fall in love and you don't see anything ever again. 2 (24m 21s): Or, I don't know. It's just, it's very, it seems very dishonest, a lot of the big like talking heads that you see right now. So I, yeah, I don't know. 0 (24m 30s): Yeah, I think, you know, like everything else that American culture oversimplifies and, you know, nuance gets drained away very quickly in, in any sort of public conversation in the United States. But, you know, it's like, I mean, think about the sports that we love, right? Like you're talking about Kyle Kingsbury, like he, he played football, he was a fighter, you know, and he's like big strong dude, but he's a sweetheart. He's a really kind person. And to me, the strength of somebody is in their demeanor, it's in their personality. And gentleness is an expression of strength. 0 (25m 14s): Gentleness is not weakness. Yeah. Right? If Kyle wanted to kick some ass, he would kick some ass, but he will do everything possible to avoid that situation. That's strength. I studied martial arts when I was very young. Like I started when I was eight, I think. And I remember the, the teacher saying like, you will do everything you possibly can never to fight. You will never fight unless your life or someone else's life is in danger and then you'll kill. That's, that's what we were trained. And the martial art I studied, it was all about killing as soon as possible, because you assume there were multiple attackers, so you don't fuck around. 0 (25m 54s): This isn't, this isn't to look cool, this is, this ends in someone dead. If you're not willing to go there, you don't go there. You don't take a single step in that direction, that strength, and that expresses as kindness and generosity and, and, you know, support for our, our community. I think those are the kinds of values of masculinity that we need to be teaching to young men. Not this bullshit about, you know, walking around with your chest out and you know, you are Mr fucking cool and you lift weights and like, that's an expression of weakness. You need to spend that much time in the gym. 0 (26m 36s): You spend that much time worrying about your fucking hair and your clothes and your tatts and your abs. That's a sign of weakness, dude. You know, strong people who are actually strong don't worry about that stuff, 2 (26m 51s): Right? That strength and confidence are silent and insecurities are loud. 0 (26m 55s): Right? You what? It's like dogs. Little dogs make all the noise. Big dogs are chill, right? 2 (27m 2s): Always. Yeah. It's always the chihuahuas and you're like, oh my God, that's a complex I've ever seen one. And then you see, you know, a German shepherd or a great day and they're just chilling. 0 (27m 11s): Andrew Tate's a fucking chihuahua. I'm sorry. Yes. You know, 2 (27m 14s): I agree. That man drives me up a wall. And it's, the thing that was so frustrating is you had like really intelligent people that were like, oh, well, he says some great stuff. I'm like, of course everyone does once in a while. But you have to look at it holistically, right? Like holistically, is that someone that you would want your daughter to date? Is that someone that you would want to date, right? Is that someone that you would, it's just no, no, no, no. Like, there's way too much wrong. Like a broken clock is right twice a day doesn't mean that it's not broken. So yeah, I, I'm glad that that seems to have like quieted down a little bit. I wanted to, I was gonna ask, did you see Chimp Empire when it came out? 0 (27m 52s): I watched the first 20 minutes and there were too many mistakes there, there were too many. See, I, I get really annoyed with what I consider to be misrepresentations of, of primate behavior, okay? That are used to sort of feed into a narrative of human behavior, which I also think is inaccurate. So, I mean, I, I don't remember all the details, but I remember one of the things they said right at the beginning, it was, chimps are our closest primate ancestors or, or primate relatives. No, they're not. 0 (28m 32s): Chimps and Bonobos are our closest primate relatives. Both of them equidistant from humans, right? Chimps are violent, chimps are aggressive sometimes there, you know, there are all these kind of qualities of chimps that people like to point at Bonobos are fucking totally chill. No one has ever seen a bonobo kill another bonobo or rape another bonobo. Never, never in the wild in zoos never. Bonobos are highly sexualized. They're totally chill, not trying to control each other's behaviors. Male chimps sometimes control the females when they're ovulating and try not to keep the other males away from them. 0 (29m 14s): Bonobos don't do that at all. Bonobos are totally relaxed and highly sexualized and peaceful. And so when I see something that says, chimps are the closest human relative, fuck you, dude. You're leaving out half the fucking story. You're leaving out half the science to support some agenda that isn't true. It's half true. So anyway, sorry to rant about that. I'm sure it was good. The chimps are fascinating, but anything that's pushing a all Chimp no bonobo agenda, I just can't fucking stubborn it. 2 (29m 51s): What would be the reason for the push? 0 (29m 54s): The push is that it's promoting a vision of human behavior, which is that, you know, the roots of human violence lie millions of years in our evolutionary past. And you know, males are bigger than females, so we've always pushed them around and raped them and dragged them off and clubbed them over the head and treated them disrespectfully. And it's, you know, our nature for males to fight and kill and to, you know, war against other groups that are competing for resources. This whole Hobbesian vision of the natural world and human nature and, and our behavior in the world. This is supported by a lot of the research into chimps, but it's totally undermined by the research into Bonobos. 0 (30m 45s): And you know, it's sometimes I say it's like I've got two brothers and they're twins, okay? Because chimps and Bonobos are much more closely related to each other than they are to us, right? They're ve they've separated one to 3 million years ago in evolutionary terms, whereas humans separated from that same line about five to 7 million years ago. So it's like, I've got twin brothers and they're twins. I'm not a twin, right? So the two of them are twins, one of them is, you know, a gangs gang leader. 0 (31m 25s): He's a murderer, he's a rapist, he's a bad, bad dude, bad piece of work in and out of prison. The other one, you know, helps children and, you know, volunteers his time, he is going around the world doing good works. He's like, Jesus, he's fantastic, but he, he's also sexually unconventional, let's say, right? And people say, well, you know, of course Chris is a bad guy. Look at his brother. Look at that gangster, criminal, horrible person. You know, they're from the same family. So of course Chris is gonna be a bad guy, right? 0 (32m 6s): What about my other brother? How come nobody mentions my other brother? A because it undermines the narrative that I'm a violent, horrible person. And that's just my nature. It's in my d n A and B because that other brother's kind of embarrassing because he's got four different girlfriends and they all know each other and they all have sex together. And, and he has friends who have sex with him as well. And it's all totally open and cool. And that freaks everybody out. Franz Deval, who's a great primatologist, who's written a bunch of books about chimps and Bonobos told me a story about how he was hired by, I think it was National Geographic, to consult on a documentary they were gonna make about Bonobos. 0 (32m 54s): And he flew, flew to Congo and met the film crew there. You know, they flew in with all their equipment and everything, and they went to this Bonobo reserve and they started filming. And these bonobos, like Bonobos have sex all the time. It's like it, the sort of phrase among Primatologists is it's a bonobo handshake. So when they, when they, they come up to each other, they sort of rub their genitals against each other. They don't have like full on intercourse necessarily, but they definitely rub their genitals. The males will like, it's called penis fencing. They sort of, you know, hit each other with their dicks and the females rub their clits against each other. 0 (33m 38s): And it happens all different combinations, different age groups, different everything except male, except mother, son. That's the only combination that doesn't happen. Anyway, so these guys are filming and they said to Franz, like, you know, when are they gonna stop having sex? And he said, ah, no, they have sex all the time. That's just the way they are. And the guy's like, well, we can't use this footage. And he said, well, that's Bonobo behavior. That's how they are. And they're like, oh shit. And they, you know, called back to Washington and explained the situation in National Geographic or whoever it was, canceled it. 0 (34m 19s): He said, well, we can't put this on tv, so we can't show this. It's embarrassing. So that's why people don't know about Bonobos because it leads to questions about the dominant narrative, right? Like we're, we're in this narrative where, you know, sex is very controlled and private and shameful and you know, and, and associated with violence and murder and mayhem and all this, you know, every fucking Hollywood movie where somebody has unconventional sex, I gotta die. You know? So that's why Bonobos aren't really acknowledged much more now than when I started doing my PhD. 0 (35m 2s): I had never heard of Bonobos and, and nobody was talking about them. 2 (35m 6s): So why are we so much, how are we at more ease with watching Mass violence and Gore Films? And that's okay. And I agree with you. It's, I had an interesting personal story with this too, but we're so much more accepting of violence and criminal behavior and things like that versus sex open love. Like everyone's consenting, everyone's an adult. Like obviously like that's the undertone, but like, that's embarrassing. We can't do that. We can't show animals and their natural behaviors because we have shame to that. But we can watch lion tear apart a gazelle. That's okay. We can watch Jeffrey Dahmer. It's a huge hit all over Netflix and everything, and people are engrossed with it. 2 (35m 48s): But we can't have anything that's like sex life that gets torn apart. 'cause oh my god, heaven forbid this woman want to find her sexuality person. Personal story. I live in this town and there's like this, it's this kind of a small town, so everyone kind of knows everyone. And especially like the quote big players, everyone knows them. He was supposed to be like this big player was supposed to be investing in one of my husband's companies. Found out that I had been in the porn industry and my husband has not like, it's just me. So my husband, you know, committed the sin of falling in love and marrying a, a former porn star. So pulls his funding, starts kind of reputation damaging around town, like don't do business with them, blah, blah, blah, right? 2 (36m 29s): Like, we're just untouchables. He then goes to start this nonprofit or not-for-profit organization in town that helps rehabilitate, not even rehabilitate, it's, it's to kind of incentivize gang leaders to send their gang members in to learn entrepreneurship in the hopes that it would reduce violence. So he would start giving them jobs and teach them about like, opening up your own business. So long as there were no violent interactions in town, and like they were still allowed to deal drugs, still allowed to be active gang members, all of this, they just couldn't commit violence. And he was doing that project and then it didn't even work. It ended up creating more problems than he was trying to help. 2 (37m 9s): So I think it recently got shut down, but I was like, I cannot believe that what I've done, which hasn't harmed anybody, is so untouchable and like to the point that you're trying to like, ruin my reputation within the community, and yet you're working with active gang members. It just was astonishing. Like the mental gymnastics for that was astonishing. 0 (37m 31s): Yeah. And, and I would argue that it's even worse because open sexuality is actually something that weakens the impulse toward violence. So what he should have been doing was, you know, embracing the open expression of sexuality at the same time that he was working to alleviate violence. There's a, a study that I think we cited in Sex at Dawn by someone named James Prescott, who was a psychologist in the, I think it was the late seventies, early eighties maybe, who was interested in the relationship between violence and sexual freedom. 0 (38m 25s): And so he went to the anthropological database, which is a sort of a database of all the studies that have ever been done on any society around the world and sort of, you know, takes the results of these studies and, and quantifies them. So you can consult this thing pretty quickly. I don't know where it is now, it's probably online somewhere, but, so he, he plugged in, he wanted to know about how much mother infant physical contact there was in a society. So how long do women typically breastfeed the babies? 0 (39m 5s): How much time do they spend holding the babies versus putting them down somewhere and freedom of like teenage sexual exploration. So is it cool for, you know, 13 year olds to be touching each other, or is that something that the society would freak out about? Right? So teenage sexual permissiveness and mother infant physical contact. So that's on one side. And the other side was measures of violence within the society and measures of violence between that society and neighboring society. So war basically. And what he found there were like 20, I think there were 28 societies that had those four measures that he could compare. 0 (39m 50s): And he found that in 27 of them, so all except one, there was a strong inverse correlation between the mother child contact and the teenage physical freedom and high levels of violence. So these things are deeply related. And once you understand that and you look at American society and you know, okay, home of the free land, of the brave, whatever, that bullshit, America's an incredibly war-like society. We've been at war forever. We're, we're the biggest army, biggest military in the world by multiples and always have been, right? 0 (40m 32s): The whole country has been about fighting, fighting, fighting, you know, killing Indians, taking their land. Then we kill the Mexicans, take their land, then we attack the Spanish, take their land. You know, it's, America is an incredibly warlike society. so it makes perfect sense that we're also a very sexually repressive society because you need frustrated, angry young men who are willing to go on and risk their lives in order to, you know, look like heroes and get laid or go and, you know, rape people in the country that you're invading like Vietnam or, you know, so that's the, the context. So in order to, to understand levels of violence, both within the society and in terms of American colonial behavior and expansionist, you know, Empire behavior, we need to understand that sexual repression is an integral part of that. 0 (41m 30s): It's not a random thing. And if you look around the world at the most violent societies like the Middle East, right? I mean, those are sex negative cultures. Those the Pakistan Egypt, millions of young men with zero prospect of getting laid except, you know, in some sort of degrading, you know, commercial human trafficking kinda situation. Those men get fed into militant groups that support the interests of, you know, religious leaders, commercial leaders, political leaders, whatever. That's the system. That's the way it works. 0 (42m 10s): If you're happy and you're, you have a really fulfilling sex life, the last thing you wanna do is go off to some other country and kill people. 2 (42m 20s): So what was the one exception in the study? Was it The US or what was the one that did that didn't have the inverse relationship? I, it 0 (42m 26s): Was, it was like the Comanche or something like that. I, I don't remember, but it was a, you know, a tribal society. 2 (42m 33s): Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah. With, it's interesting that we have access to those studies. And then in a culture like the United States, we're still trying to, I don't know, have that level of control over people's autonomy and sexual desires. Like, we're still trying to be super skeptical of Pleasure and say, if it feels good, then it's probably bad for you. It makes you weak because you're succumbing to your pleasures, right? Instead of like, no, I'm here to enjoy the human experience. And especially if you look at female anatomy, like you literally have all of these like sensors concentrated in one place that is purely for Pleasure. 2 (43m 14s): Like, why is that there, there's no other function. So how do you tell me that that's innately wrong or a mistake? It just doesn't make sense to me. Yeah, 0 (43m 22s): Yeah. The, the war on Masturbation yes. Is just one of the craziest things ever. You know, as recently as a hundred years ago, they, you know, they were the, the leading experts on parenting were telling parents that, well, if your little girl touches her clitoris, you need to pour carbolic acid on her clitoris acid. Oh my God. To teach her not to touch it. And if your little boy is masturbating too much, you need to sew his, the foreskin of his penis closed with wire wire sutures so that when he gets an erection, it'll cause so much pain that it'll stop him from wanting to be aroused. 0 (44m 5s): That's barbaric. Yeah. I mean, that's straight up child abuse. Yeah. And yet, a hundred years ago, that was in the leading bestselling, you know, parenting books, you know, and the entire fucking Kellogg Corn flakes and graham crackers, holy cow, all that stuff was to stop boys from masturbating because it tasted so bland that it would somehow make them not wanna jerk off. I don't really understand the connection. No. So 2 (44m 34s): I saw that the other day and I, I had no idea. So Dr. Kellogg was a, a freak and like, not in a good way, like, just like a bad dude. And I guess what happened was is he was really championing genital mutilation within the states. We weren't necessarily comfortable doing it to girls, but we were okay doing it to boys. So he was really endorsing circumcision because he thought that by desensitizing the tip of the penis, it would lead to a reduction in Masturbation. And then, because we weren't like fully mutilating the children, he's like, well, I'll introduce a kid's product, a breakfast product, corn flakes that will help reduce sexual desire via, there's something in corn that lowers your testosterone in both boys and girls. 2 (45m 19s): And that's a huge driver for sexual function. So he is essentially trying to sterilize and desensitize children through breakfast foods, which is fucking insane. It's insane. Yeah, 0 (45m 32s): Yeah, yeah. I, you know, people have trouble. Like, you know, a lot of your questions are like, well, why this totally crazy seeming thing? Why is it so prevalent? I think the, the really uncomfortable realization that a lot of people don't want to arrive at, but it's pretty necessary to understand things, is that we live in a pathological society. The American society and western civilization in general are pathological. They're sick. And so when you're living in a society, the values of which are objectively pathological, that's a very difficult place to be because you can't trust what you're told. 0 (46m 20s): You can't even trust what's already in your own head. Because from childhood before you had any critical capacities, you've been told, don't touch your bo don't touch yourself. That's ugly. Don't, oh, don't look at her like with any kind of desire. That's toxic masculinity. Don't enjoy anything because Pleasure is the devil's playground. I mean, holy shit, there's so much misinformation being fed to children about, you know, go to sleep right now. I don't care if you're not tired, eat right now. I don't care if you're not hungry, right? Oh, you need to go to the bathroom. No, sorry. You need to wait till the end of class. That 2 (46m 60s): One is insane. Like, you're instilling the sense of someone else having ownership over your body at a very young age, and like, do not be mistaken. That's exactly why it's there, right? If someone else is in, is more control of you than you are of you. 0 (47m 13s): And also you are disconnecting from your own body, right? Yes. So whatever desire you're feeling, your hunger, your sexual desire, you need to take a dump. Whatever it is, ignore it, ignore it, ignore it, ignore it. And then we get confused why people have chronic back pain or women have trouble achieving orgasm, or men are totally, you know, can't get it up or whatever. It's like, well, of course we've cut all the communication between the mind and the body. Of course there are gonna be all these problems. Of course, anxiety and stress are gonna manifest in the body in ways that we don't understand because we don't feel it happening. 'cause we're not monitoring our bodies. 0 (47m 54s): Right? So yeah, I, this will probably be the next book I write is about this deep distrust of Pleasure and how it manifests in all sorts of health problems. And, you know, the basic idea is that if we learn to embrace our Pleasure, we'll have much better health. And we don't need to, you know, worry about did you walk 10,000 steps or did you, how many calories did you eat? Or blah, blah, blah. All this bullshit. Because I think a lot of the, ironically, a lot of the health advice that we get in the United States is based upon this, this idea that the body is the enemy and Pleasure is dangerous. 0 (48m 44s): And so as long as we see our bodies as suspicious, you know, enemies, then we're, you know, there's internal conflict is never gonna lead to a good place. And I think that's based on this sort of puritanical view of Pleasure and the body. 2 (49m 2s): That book sounds fascinating. I really do hope that you write it because it, to me, it just makes sense, right? If you're kind of barricading an access point, an entire energy structure, of course it's gonna create disease throughout the rest of the body. Like you're literally trying to shut it down and it doesn't seem healthy. And when you look at the studies around Ed specifically, a lot of it's linked towards shame. So I'm sure you probably know not Dr. Nicole Prowsey. Mm, no, no. She's, she's friends with Dr. David Lay and Oh, 0 (49m 35s): I know him. 2 (49m 36s): Yeah. So I think that's how I found a lot of her work. And then Jamie Wheel had mentioned some of her work in his book, recapture the Rapture. So I was like, who is this woman? Right? I need to see what she's studying. And a lot of, when it came to people that were self-identified porn or sex addicts, or people that had a lot of ed, it was coupled with a more conservative upbringing and this idea of shame being linked to Pleasure, right? So it's almost like a subconscious thing that's shutting down your body's physiology and being able to function. It's not like it's the boogeyman in your head. Like there's no real problem. It's not the porn, it's not the sex, it's not anything else. It's like you just need to free yourself from this cage that you've been put in. 0 (50m 15s): Yeah. Yeah. David Lay is great. I've had him on my podcast, love it a couple times. There's a film by a Spanish filmmaker, one, one of my favorite film directors, Luis Bowell, what's it called? I forget the name of the film, but it begins, he, he was doing Films in the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. I think his last film might've been in the early seventies. He was a surrealist filmmaker. His Films are fucking bizarre, really strange. But this one that I'm thinking of, it opens at a dinner party and all these people are sitting around the table, maybe 15, 20 people sitting around the table and they're all the, like the most respectable members of society. 0 (50m 60s): Like the bishop is there and the general, and the mayor and you know, like, and they're all their fancy wives and they're all these fancy, wonderful people and they're all ha ha ha ha ha ha. And they're all sitting there, but there are no, there are no plates on the table. So you kind of like, you're watching this thing happening and, and you're like, okay, this is obviously a dinner party and they're drinking wine, but there are no plates or anything and there's all this polite conversation happening, all this small talk. And the camera pans back and you see that everyone's sitting on toilets and they're all like sitting around on toilets around this table. And then someone says, oh, please excuse me for a moment. 0 (51m 43s): And, and they get up and pull their pants up and go and they go into this little room and they sit down and there's food there and they like eat the food and all like, shamefully eat this food. And then they wipe their faces and then they go back out and take their pants down and sit on the toilets again. And the point is like, this shit's totally arbitrary. Like who decided, like eating is something we all do, you know, at a party. And shitting is something we all do. Oh no, go hide that. Pretend it doesn't happen. You know, pretend we're not animals. It's ridiculous, by the way, did you, did you know that I have an AVN? 2 (52m 18s): No, what's it for? 0 (52m 20s): Yeah, where is it? Oh, hold on here. 2 (52m 26s): Oh my God. Congratulations. 0 (52m 28s): Isn't that great? 2 (52m 30s): It's amazing. 0 (52m 31s): It's the weirdest av n ever. Do you use video on your podcast or is this just audio? 2 (52m 37s): Yes, they do. Yes. Thank God I do. 0 (52m 39s): So people can see it's, it's, it's a mirror image in the camera. But yeah, it's best non-sex performance. 2 (52m 51s): What film are you in? 0 (52m 53s): It was called Marriage 2.0. And I think winning an AVN for best non-sex performance is, is the weirdest accomplishment ever. You know, it's like, you know, winning some sort of basketball trophy for never taking a shot or something. It's like, I dunno. Yeah, no, I, I knew this guy who was producing a, a film and he, he had funding from, I forget who it is, some sex toy manufacturer. But anyway, they gave him a hundred thousand dollars and he wanted to make a film that would, you know, the holy grail of porn, which is like, oh, it's a serious movie, but there's sex in it, right? 0 (53m 40s): And so his idea was the, he wrote the screenplay around a couple who have been together a few years, and they're starting to have some issues, some insecurity and whatever, and they decide to open up their relationship. And so it's their journey of, you know, swinging and, you know, ethical non-monogamy and, and it's different forms. Who was the, I forget the stars. They're well known. Oh, some India Summer. 2 (54m 16s): Oh yeah. She's amazing. 0 (54m 18s): Yeah, she was the lead and then the guy was, fuck, I forget his name. He, you know, he had one of those porn names like Pound or, or some something, some dumb porn name, but he's well known as well. And, and who was the, the, the big seventies porn star? I've had her on my podcast a few times. You know, classic blonde, she's a, a sex teacher, she's an educator now. Oh 2 (54m 51s): My gosh, why is that escaping me? 0 (54m 53s): Yeah, me too. I'll remember in a second. She was in a Nina Hartley. Nina Hartley. Yeah. Yeah, Nina. So anyway, the idea was these people are going through this thing and the woman is a documentary filmmaker played by India Summer. And so she's experiencing a lot of jealousy and, and rage and weirdness 'cause her guys with these other women and whatever. And so she decides that the way she's gonna deal with this is to interview people. She's gonna make a documentary. So there's a film within the film and she's gonna interview, you know, sort of experts about this stuff. So she interviews me as myself, right? 0 (55m 36s): So I'm the guy, the Sex of Don Guy, and she's interviewing me and we have this conversation and then she starts to cry and she runs off out of the set. And then the next scene I'm in the kitchen and we're having a, you know, heart-to-heart conversation and talking about jealousy and insecurity and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And anyway, so that's, that's how I won the AVN. 2 (56m 0s): That's incredible. I'm so pleasantly surprised and I'm so glad that you shared that. It's amazing. That's so, 0 (56m 8s): It, it's the only trophy I've ever won. Well, 2 (56m 11s): I mean, I still don't have one. So, good for you. You outperformed me, 0 (56m 17s): So to speak. 2 (56m 18s): That's amazing. When it comes to, there's so many places I wanna go, and I don't wanna take too much of your time. When it comes to going back to Bonobos and looking at ways that maybe we weren't necessarily Wired for monogamy or that there were sections of home like hominids that weren't monogamous. Everyone kind of says, well, if you look at culture, even now, today and across the world, there's only, the only ones that are non, non-monogamous are led by men. So it'll be like one man, many women, but there's never the inverse. so it kind of perpetuates the idea that women aren't, don't have a proclivity towards sexuality, towards Pleasure, towards non-monogamy. 2 (57m 1s): That non-monogamy is strictly a male desire or adherence. 0 (57m 6s): Yeah. A a lot of what happens is that people who make these kind of statements or claim to have found this evidence don't understand that their projecting a set of cultural values onto the evidence that they're gathering. So for example, people often say, well, there are no matriarchal societies. So it's just natural that men are stronger, men are the leaders because there are all these patriarchal societies, but there are no matriarchal societies. The reason they don't see matriarchal societies is that they're looking for societies that are the mirror image of patriarchy. 0 (57m 51s): So they're looking for societies where there are dominant females who degrade the males and sort of rule, you know, with an iron fist and, you know, throw males into prison or burn them at the stake for doing things that they don't like. What they don't understand is that's not how women understand power. That's not how women work with power. And that's one of the things with bonobos. Bonobos are female dominant species in the sense that if, when, when there's a limited amount of food, for example, in chimps, there dominant males decide who gets the food, they distribute it in Bonobos, the dominant females decide who gets the food. 0 (58m 40s): Although normally it's just shared. If you throw a, a bag of food into a Chimp enclosure in a zoo, all hell breaks out, breaks loose. They, they fight the dominant males take control of the food. They share it among themselves. Maybe they'll give some to a female if she's ovulating. 'cause that's the only time she's of any sort of value to them, right? You throw a bag of food into an enclosure of Bonobos, it causes stress just like it does in chimps. But the way Bonobos deal with stress is they all have sex with each other and then they share the food. Friends, Deval, who I mentioned earlier, said it really well. 0 (59m 21s): He said, chimps use violence to get sex and Bonobos use sex to avoid violence. 2 (59m 30s): Mm. 0 (59m 30s): Right? These are our two closest ancestors or our two closest relatives. They're not really ancestors 'cause they exist now. That's why I get so vehement about any discussion of primate origins of human behavior, including both of them, because they're so different. Right. And if we ignore Bonobos, people don't know there's this other possibility for human behavior that there's a a 50%, you know, viability for this path forward rather than the Chimp path forward. You know, and people say, well, we're looking for, you know, peace on earth. 0 (1h 0m 13s): Well, peace on earth, you better look at sex and love and authenticity as well. Or you'll never get to peace on earth. 2 (1h 0m 20s): Yeah. In that, in the Chimp Empire, it was interesting because there was one, so they had two tribes that were kind of going at it and trying to fight for territory and resources. And you see like the stereotypical behavior out of most of the males, which is they are only engaged with the females when they're ovulating. Other than that, it's like, it gets a very means to an end relationship. But there was this one Chimp that kind of started playing a different game. And what he did was he started to create friendships with the females and he was engaging with them when they weren't ovulating. He'd help them with things. And right then, even when they weren't ovulating, they would have sex with him. And then he ended up having just as many, if not more offspring than the Alpha, right? 2 (1h 1m 5s): But no one knew because he wasn't trying to be number one, he wasn't going at it in the more primitive ways. He kind of seemed a little bit more evolved, which I thought was fascinating. It was almost more human than some of the alphas. And then when I see the alphas, I'm like, some of those alphas look a lot like a lot of humans I see right now on TikTok. And this other creature is being a lot more, a lot more evolved. So I wonder if there'll be another split where you do see some of these chimps that go more the path of the bonobo where it's, it's not so Machiavellian and it's just a little bit more like, a little bit more abundant in sharing and not led with so much violence. 2 (1h 1m 48s): Because as a human watching it and you see the space and you see how many fruit trees there are and how ridiculous this idea of territories is. And you're like, whoa. If you scale that out, I wonder if you're an alien looking at us. They're saying the same thing. And how we see each other as other, and then that is the problem. We see everything through like famine and scarcity, and there's not enough pie for everyone. So we have to fight our neighbor instead of realizing there is just so much of everything. There's more than enough of everything. And if you went through it from a different lens and perspective, you wouldn't have all of this violence and bloodshed and it's just totally avoidable. But they're just, they don't have the capacity to see Beyond. that, 0 (1h 2m 27s): Yeah, that makes me think of, of two interesting studies or observations by scientists. One is study, and I don't remember who did it, it's been years since I read it, but they, they were looking at, you know, they were trying to sort of quantify how women look at men as potential mates and they sort of assess their economic prospects, right? So what they did was they, they took maybe 50 men and they took photos of the men wearing like a suit and a tie and you know, haircut and all that kinda shit. 0 (1h 3m 11s): And then took photos of the same men just looking kind of ratty, you know, dirty t-shirt, you know, haven't shaved for a while, whatever. And they showed women photos of these men quickly, just a flash. And the woman had to sort of like rate one to five how attractive she found the man, right? So they ran this through many, many women and what they found was okay, the women rated the same man much more attractive when he was in a suit and tie and all that. Okay? So what they're trying to prove is that this economic stuff is attractive to women. It's not just the guy the way his face is and symmetry or whatever, right? 0 (1h 3m 53s): But then someone who read this study, some graduate student somewhere was like, well, what if we added a third group, which was the man, he's not really, he's not like looking all ratty and, and like he's slept in his car, but he's also not, you know, Mr. Businessman, he's just like, maybe he's like an artist or he's so he is clean and he is, takes care of himself, but he's not in that economic game, right? And it turned out women found him to be the most attractive. Mm. So there's the sort of losers, there's the winners and there's the guys who aren't playing the game at all, which a lot of women find to be the most attractive manifestation, right? 0 (1h 4m 39s): So I think that's an interesting thing to keep in mind. And again, you know, you gotta always look at the way the question's framed, right? Like, oh, there are no matriarchies in the world. Well that's 'cause you're looking for abusive women. Women wield power through consensus. Women don't want men to be below them. Women aren't as hierarchical, they're more inclusive. And there are societies in which women have the final say, the Iroquois for example, which were the sort of bicameral structure of the American government with Congress. And the Senate came because Benjamin Franklin and other colonial political experts understood the way the Iroquois political system worked. 0 (1h 5m 26s): And they copied that. And the way it worked is the men would have a council and sit in a circle and the women sat around, the men, the men would argue, deciding, what are we gonna do? Are we gonna go to war? Are we gonna move to this other up to the lakes? Are we gonna go here? Are we gonna go there? And they would come to a decision, but the decision didn't hold unless the women agreed. And if the women said no, then the men had to go back and start arguing again and come up with another plan. The women had the final say, but they weren't doing the arguing, they were doing the final decision. That's reflected in the American political system. 0 (1h 6m 7s): Most people don't know that. But that's a perfect example of how women can, can wield power. Anyway, the other study that is really one of the most sort of inspiring bits of scientific evidence I know of in this realm is by Robert Polsky, who teaches at Stanford. He's a neuroscientist and he's been studying the same troop of baboons in Kenya for probably 30 years now since he was a graduate student. He goes there every summer and he studies stress hormones in males based on where they are in the male hierarchy, because baboons are extremely hierarchical and, and rigid male dominant, pretty violent. 0 (1h 6m 58s): And what he does is he goes there with a blow gun and darts them and they pass out and he takes blood samples and does this. So he is been doing this forever. And about probably 10 or 15 years ago now, the troop that he's been studying, they built a hotel for, you know, safari tourism and this troop sort of took over the dump of the hotel. And so he's seen this troop through generations, right? He's seen them babies born, they get old and die and new babies. He's just seen them coming and coming and come. So they've taken over this dump outside the hotel and one year there was some poison meat that was thrown into the dump. 0 (1h 7m 49s): Yeah, I think it had tuberculosis in it. And so meat is very valuable. So who gets the meat? The high status males, right? The, the top of the male hierarchy, all those males died. So suddenly you've got a baboon troop that only has lower ranking males who are by definition less violent. They're not abusing the females the way those Alpha males do females and young. And so he thought, oh my god, this is gonna be a massacre. Because the way baboons work is each year the males who have reached sexual maturity are driven out of the group that they were born into by the ranking males. 0 (1h 8m 38s): They don't want these young guys, you know, causing any problems. So they push them out and they need to fight their way into a different group. And so they're looking for weaker older males that they can go in and, and, you know, dominate and take over. So this group has no dominant males at all. So these, it's gonna be like pirates landing on the island when all the men are gone. You know, like the, it's gonna be a disaster. But before that happened, this, this troop sort of developed a more chill, relaxed culture because all the violent guys were gone. 0 (1h 9m 18s): The guys who were left were, were more sort of live and let live and everybody was happy. And he's like, okay, this is great now, but it's not gonna last. So he went back to Stanford, then he comes back the next year expecting to see a massacre and he sees that yes, there are new males that have joined the group, these young males, but they're super chill too. And year after year after year, new males join the group and they look around and say, well, nobody seems to be fighting. I guess I don't need to fight. Everybody's getting laid, this is awesome. And they relax. And so the culture of peace within this baboon troop dominates whatever sort of biological impulse there was toward violence. 0 (1h 10m 8s): So it's a really interesting experiment, you know, that nobody did intentionally, but it seems to demonstrate that a peaceful culture is capable of overwhelming whatever impulse toward violence young males might have based on testosterone or, you know, traumatic youth or whatever. There aren't a lot of things that give me hope, but that, that situation is one of them. 2 (1h 10m 38s): That's so fascinating. So I mean, it goes back to the importance of what you sur what and who you surround yourself with and the content that you're consuming and what kind of vacuums you tend to find yourself in. And if you remove yourself, you can be, you can be the bonobo instead of the Chimp. 0 (1h 10m 54s): Exactly. It's a choice that we have and everyone is making it, whether consciously or unconsciously. 2 (1h 11m 3s): Before we start to wrap up, wrap up, I wanna ask, what is, like if there's one myth, one of like the biggest Misunderstandings that you could debunk in all of the years of your work, what would it be? 0 (1h 11m 18s): Well, one thing that I, I think is really important to talk about is the dirty t-shirt study, or the smelly t-shirt study by Claus Vatican, who was a Swiss researcher probably 20 years ago now. He was thinking about the fact that you'll often hear women say, talking about, you know, a, a man that they've met recently. Women say things like, well, you know, he's a really nice guy and he's attractive and he's good in bed and, but there's just, he just doesn't smell right. 0 (1h 12m 5s): You'll never hear a guy say that. I mean, very rarely. Right? And Klaus Vatican was thinking, he's, he's a immunity researcher and he was thinking, well, women have a sense of smell much more acute than men's. so it makes sense that they would be more tuned in to smell than men are But. why, why do they, you know, getting back to the beginning of our conversation, is there an evolutionary reason for this, for women to have? And the conventional view is, well when a woman's pregnant, you know, it's very important what food she eats. 0 (1h 12m 45s): 'cause some food might be damaging to the fetus. And you know, so her sense of smell is important. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. But it isn't just when they're pregnant, it's all the time. And it seems to be tied into mate selection somehow. So his hypothesis was maybe women are picking up information about men's immune systems from their smell. So what he did, there's something called the major histocompatibility index, which is for the sake of, of illustration, we'll say that there are five different kinds or classes of pathogens that attack our immune system. 0 (1h 13m 26s): And so we have five different responses, right? So what he did was he found men who were high in four and low in one, one of those five categories. And his thinking was, if I find women who are normal in four levels, but low in that level, they won't be attracted to this guy because their baby would be very vulnerable. 'cause the baby probably will be super low in that category and so likely to get sick or die. Right? So he had these guys wear t-shirts for five days and nights, no showers, no deodorant, nothing, just t-shirt and body odor. 0 (1h 14m 16s): And then he took those t-shirts, put them in Ziploc bags, and he sat the women down and he had them smell the T-shirts and tried to judge how attractive the man was based only on his smell. They never saw the men, right? And so he tabulated the results and what he found was that about 80% of the women chose exactly as he predicted. They chose the men who were high in the thing that she was low in so that his immune system would compensate for her vulnerability and their baby would be stronger. And the man who was low in the thing that she was low in, she was not attracted to. 0 (1h 14m 57s): She found his smell to be horrible and repulsive and not into it at all. Right? But about 20% of the women seemed to be choosing randomly, they weren't fitting into this pattern. So he ran the test again, got the same results, then he went back and looked and interviewed the women again. He hadn't asked them about birth control. So he went back and asked them, you know, are you on any birth control? And what he found was that the 20% who were choosing randomly were on the pill. Whoa. And the others weren't. So imagine, and it makes sense, right? Because the pill Yeah. Convinces your body that you're already pregnant. So if you're already pregnant, it doesn't matter what the guys smell like, you're not gonna get pregnant again and you know, until you've had the baby or whatever. 0 (1h 15m 43s): So how many relationships, the woman's on the pill she meets the dude, good sense of humor, they both like Thai food and you know, Louis CK or whatever, and they get together, they get married or whatever, they form a relationship, decide they're gonna have a baby. She goes off the pill, she has the baby, baby's born. Okay, now this dude stinks. She doesn't want to be anywhere near him, right? It's not his fault, it's not her fault, it's nobody's fault. And to make it even worse, the baby is likely to be unhealthy because they've totally short-circuited this natural inborn mechanism that we have for choosing our, you know, people we're gonna have babies with based upon immunological compatibility. 0 (1h 16m 45s): So this idea that, and and you know, and this gets back to problems we were talking about earlier, like I think one of the big problems that we have is that men think women think like men and women think that men think like women. And of course we think very differently. Like the things we're into are very different and men can't imagine what it's like to have a sense of smell that's 20 times stronger and be sort of attracted and repulsed by things that we can't even sense, you know? So like a guy will go out and have sex with a woman and come home and be surprised that his wife like knows of course she knows. She smells it on you, dude. 0 (1h 17m 26s): It's like you're, you know, trying to walk by a dog with a steak in your pocket and think the dog's not gonna notice. Like you're, you're in totally different worlds, you know? Anyway, so that's something that I think it's really important for people to know about. If, if, and this isn't like an anti birth control diatribe at all, but just if a woman's on the pill and meets a dude, go off the pill. Use something else for a while before you make any major decisions because that might not line up and you won't even know it until it's too late. 2 (1h 18m 1s): That is fascinating. I've heard similar people try to break down, you know, oh it's just pheromones or it'll make you more attracted to more feminine men, like, more like passive men or like ones that have more feminine features versus you tend to be more attracted to more masculine features if you're off of the pill. But I had no idea about the health and like the immuno comparability or anything like that. And that makes so much sense. And I love this era that we're in where people are kind of really unpacking birth control and we're really understanding everything that goes into taking it. And again, it's not anti pill, but it's just conscious consent and knowing everything that you're signing up for. 2 (1h 18m 44s): 'cause I know when I started they just said, oh, this will make your skin great and your cramps go away. That was it. Like they didn't tell you increased risk of, of stroke or synthetically altering your hormones that could be issues down the road for autoimmunity. None of that was, you know, given to us. So I think that is super valuable. Thank you so much for sharing. And yeah ladies, I would pay attention to that. 0 (1h 19m 6s): I was, I was doing a radio interview one time shortly after Sex at Dawn came out, and I, I was talking about that and the guy I was interviewing or who was interviewing me, I saw his eyes just like, like he had seen a ghost. He was just sitting there like, oh, his mouth was open and he started like pointing at himself while I'm talking, right? I'm like in the middle of, you know, the trying to explain the research and all this. And he's like, oh. And after the interview, as soon we stopped shortly after that. And so he turned off the mics. He was like, dude, you just explained the failure of my marriage. 2 (1h 19m 49s): Whoa, 0 (1h 19m 49s): I you just, now I know why she left me. And it was like, yeah, like after we had the baby, she was just like, I'm sorry, I don't wanna sleep with you. I don't wanna, you know, there's something, your smell has changed. And the dude was like, what are you talking about? My smell has changed. Like, you know, and imagine the heartbreak of like, you know, 'cause you still love each other, whatever, whatever was happening, you know, between your minds that hasn't changed and now you have a baby together, but you can't trick the body, you know? 2 (1h 20m 25s): Right. And it goes back to having that inner knowing and Listening to Your Body and understanding that there's just so much intelligence within it. And to try to reconnect if you feel like you're disconnected with it, and to not give that power away or outsource it to someone else. 'cause you have so much of it within your, within yourself. 0 (1h 20m 43s): Yeah. I think one of the most damaging lies that we're told is that we're not animals. Right? I mean, that, that gets back to the, the movie where everyone's shitting around the table. And you know what I said earlier about living in a pathological society and all that, you know, we're, we're told whether it's religiously or culturally or whatever, that we are not animals. That we are something above and beyond and you know, whether it's angels or spirits or whatever. And of course we have spiritual dimensions, we have all sorts of things, but we are animals. And when we ignore that, we run into serious problems. 0 (1h 21m 28s): You know, whether it's digestive problems or sleep problems or sexual problems or cancer or you know, whatever. However it manifests. And I think, you know, this is an example of how medical professionals are telling you, oh, it'll make your skin better and this and that, but they're not telling you you're an animal. This is altering your hormone, your hormonal system, which is very complex changes all throughout your every month. This is gonna change the way you feel, the way you sleep, the way you taste. And I, I was with a woman who went on the pill for a while and she was like, this, I can't taste anything. I can't smell anything. 0 (1h 22m 9s): Like, I'm not as present in my body. She was a dancer, she was actually a, a stripper at the time in San Francisco and she was super embodied and she was like, I can't feel my body like this is, this isn't just, you know what they say it does. This is so much more. So yeah, I think we need to begin, and this was, I think one of the central messages of Sex at Dawn is we are animals. You know, we're more than that. We're, we're a lot, but we are animals and we have appetites and those appetites will be present whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. 0 (1h 22m 53s): So it's much smarter to acknowledge them and acknowledge our, our and work with it rather than deny it. 2 (1h 23m 3s): Yeah. It's integrating instead of trying to cast aside. Right. And it's all, it's, which is interesting because you have a lot of the more all, I guess more of like the right conservative Christians that use Carl Young a lot as their example and like way to break the concepts down in psychology. And he's all about integrative shadow work and not casting things aside. Right? But in that a lot of those communities, like that's what they're doing with Pleasure and sexuality is they're not integrating it as they are casting it aside. So I, that parallel is interesting to me. I just realized that. 0 (1h 23m 37s): Yeah, I don't think Carl Jung would be real down with Jordan Peterson, you know, and his approach to, to women and sexuality and Pleasure Jung was a very sexual guy and had an unconventional relationship. He, there was a, a woman who lived with Jung and his wife for 20 years or so, the last 20 years of, of his life. And I don't know if he was having sex with his wife or not, but he was, you know, this was his mistress and, and his wife was down and they all lived together and you know, that was in the, you know, 1905 or something quite a while ago 2 (1h 24m 18s): From Trailblazer. 0 (1h 24m 20s): Yeah, 2 (1h 24m 21s): No, that, yeah, that's interesting because there's that, one of his viral speeches or quotes was like, what are you, what are you giving up? If you were to just like grow up and mature and you're gonna have what you're gonna give, give away nights of Pleasure, nights of sex with random strangers nights, like almost writing off or discounting. I think a very crucial age of development, which is exploring and curiosity and just living to live. Like it doesn't ne necessarily have to have a, an outcome or an end goal like that is the goal, is to just live, just be present, just experience. And in the, in your youth, I think that helps you discern between who am I, what do I want, what do I not want? 2 (1h 25m 4s): What is like who that real, who am I, like my essence, not like these roles and functions that I play not to get to work and get married and make a family. Which I think, yes, they have their purpose and their, it can, it can be beautifully done, but do it consciously. And the only way that you can do it consciously is through experience. So to write it off as frivolous didn't make sense to me. It's, we're not frivolous, it's crucial in development. 0 (1h 25m 26s): Yeah. Yeah. It's true. It, I mean, I would agree with that perspective to the, to the extent that it's a journey and we shouldn't get stuck at any particular level of the journey, right? There's no arrival. It's a continuous process. So as you say that exploration is an important part of our process and hopefully it leads to a sort of refined sense of where we're going and, and what we want. Which doesn't necessarily mean that you arrive at one partner in a family and all that, but at least it means you arrive at a, a sense of what's important to you and, and how to live your life in integrity. 2 (1h 26m 12s): Absolutely. Chris, this was amazing. I could keep you here for easily another hour, but I don't wanna do that too. I would love to have you back on in the future whenever you have some time for me. But before we sign off, can you tell listeners where they can follow you, how they can support you, anything you're working on, all that good stuff? 0 (1h 26m 27s): Yeah, all my stuff is on sub stack sub stack, Chris Ryan do sub stack.com. The podcast is tangentially speaking, I've been doing it for 11 or 12 years now. It's been a long time. And yeah, I, I write stuff and, and do things on stuff ck so I also have my own personal website that chris Ryan dot com or chris Ryan dot sub stack.com. 2 (1h 26m 57s): Awesome. Well thank you again. 0 (1h 26m 59s): Yeah, thank you. It's been fun. 2 (1h 27m 0s): That's it for this week's episode of Chatting with Candace. But before you go, if you liked the podcast, please leave a five star review and share it with a friend or on social media. Word of mouth is the best way to grow a podcast. And if it's personally endorsed by a friend or family member, then someone's more likely to listen. So if you enjoyed this, found it informative, clip it up, share it, and leave that review and I'll see you next week. Thank you everybody. Bye.