Quotes

[1:44–3:20] The hair salon study:

the study that we did... where we ostensibly sort of put women our female participants in a hypothetical hair salon situation. So we effectively said look here's a series of clients and we showed them photos of the client um so they could make their own judgments about how attractive she was. And we coupled that with photos close, you know, close-up photos of her hair which were doctored to make it healthy or not. And um and we basically asked them, how much hair do you think this client should have cut off? And we coupled that with some information about the client. Um the bit that was most important was whether she wanted her hair kept as long as possible or whether she was happy to have as much cut off as the hairdresser thought. And in the scenarios where the hair was really healthy, so there's no motivation to cut much off um and where the client indicated that she wanted it kept as long as possible. So cutting it off would be explicitly against her wishes. That's when we saw a relationship between self-reported intrasexual competitiveness and how much hair they advise these clients have cut off. So, and that effect again was the strongest when they were giving this advice to clients that they later told us um they thought were about as attractive as themselves. So, effectively what we had is women perceiving other women to be sort of somewhat um rivals to them on a on a sort of mate value ladder and attempting to sabotage these women's appearance by advise them to cut off more hair than would be necessary.

[3:20–4:08] Men's preference for long hair (and women's implicit awareness):

And I guess the other little aside that you need in order for that to make sense is you also need to understand how much and how strongly men prefer long hair... it's something that female viewers will that that I find that women are actually much less aware of than men is that men actually have quite a strong preference for long hair over short hair. And it's interesting that... even though many women I talk to don't recognize that men have a preference over long hair, yet we still see this effect. So somehow women are implicitly aware that cutting off a woman's hair is going to be damaging her mate value even if they're not explicitly aware of this strong preference that men have.

[4:08–5:23] Why men prefer it — health and parasite resistance:

hair signals two things as far as I can tell. So, one is just health. So, if you've got nice shiny long healthy hair and of course the longer the hair is, the harder it is to keep it nice and shiny and healthy and most importantly parasite free... in humans, in nonhumans, in birds with their big showy feathers, a big part of that display... in many cases, these types of um feathers and hair, which you know, all sorts of little nasty bugs can colonize and enjoy living in. So being able to have this really showy display piece um that is free of parasites is a really good sign that you are reasonably robust um and at least robust to the particular whatever little collection of potential parasites there are in this current environment. So that's one thing. It's just a basic signal of health and resistance your current health and your sort of potential resistance to disease.

[5:37–6:58] Hair as a flexible sexual signal (up vs. down):

However, the other thing that hair does is not so much for men, but it actually does something for women. So, the other thing that hair does, um, is it gives long hair, I should say, is it gives women a level of flexibility in their sexual signaling. So, women will wear their hair up when they're wanting to give a sexual signal that is like not available, and they wear their hair down as a sexual signal of availability. And even if men and women are not consciously aware of this, men and women both perceive this implicitly. So if you just give men and women photos of women and you judge, you know, how flirty is she, both men and women will perceive hair up as like a not very approachable signal and hair down as an approachable signal. So when women are wearing their hair short, so too short to either put it up or down, you've really just got one style because of how short it is. That's also depriving women of that flexibility in their sexual signaling as well.

[6:58–7:53] Pixie cuts as self-sabotage by attractive women:

a separate sort of phenomenon is this idea of women sort of getting these pixie cuts and getting bob cuts and really short things. And that also is a kind of a self-sabotage sexual signal. And this is why, you know, really attractive women can sort of get away with that because they've got lots of sexual signals available to them. They've, you know, perhaps got a fair amount of social capital. And so a really attractive woman deciding to go for a pixie cut is, you know, bearing a much lower cost than if she can sort of make this a little bit of a fad. And then a whole bunch of less attractive women do the same thing. And for them, it's a much more costly signal. So it's like a little bit of self-sabotage in the hope that other women copy you and it hurts them much more than it hurts you.

[7:53–8:20] The same principle drives female fashion:

And that is the underlying principle of female fashion. By the way, that is why female clothes are generally speaking the fashionable ones, whatever is like new this season. That's why they're never flattering. They're never flattering unless you're like a size eight model who would be, you know, flattered by a piece of string wrapped around you. They're not flattering because they're designed that, you know, women have to incur some sort of a mate value cost in order to keep up with these fashions.

[9:53–10:54] The makeup study:

one thing that we have shown and this was with a PhD student of mine and so her thesis is is out there and published but the individual paper um with this chapter in it is is not yet. Um, but what she showed is that we took photos of women and we added makeup to them digitally and we got men and women to then rate these photos for various types of things. Um, and each sort of participant only saw, I think, either the made-up photos or the not made-up ones. So, participants had no sort of obvious cue that makeup is what we were manipulating. But when we looked at the results, what we saw is that on the whole, men did not find makeup more attractive than no makeup. In fact, they found it to be less attractive. Um, women on the whole found it to be more attractive. But there's this one group of men as sort of a subset of men if you like who actually did find makeup to be more attractive. Um, and that was the men who rated themselves as being very very high on mate value.

[10:54–11:32] The underlying principle of female competition:

it speaks to that principle which I think is a kind of a fundamental principle of female competition which is the idea that a tremendous part of female competition is individuals who are high mate value, high social status, have access to a lot of resources effectively burning themselves in the hope that them doing that will cause others to do it but others will bear a bigger cost than they will.

[11:32–12:25] The peacock's tail analogy:

female intrasexual competition is it's a little bit like the peacock's tail. So, peacocks have giant tails. Um, partly because it shows that they're parasite free. But another big part of it is that it's a massive handicap, right? If you've got this great big tail and you've got to get away from the predators... the fact that a male peacock is alive and has this massive tail means that he must be pretty good at escaping because all else being equal, a similarly looking male peacock but with a smaller tail has not had to work so hard just to survive. So all other things being equal, the guy with the bigger tail must be more robust, stronger, fitter, whatever you would expect or at least has had to be in order to make it to this point... And that basic principle, that handicap principle, I think is a huge driver of most of female intrasexual competition.

[12:25–13:49] How the asymmetric cost works in makeup:

you're really attractive women. They're wearing this makeup that men do not find attractive. Like on balance, men would just prefer women to not be wearing it on balance, right? Women think it looks more attractive. That's a pretty clear sex difference for the most part. But in men, it's moderated by their own self-report mate value. The alpha males who of course are the men that these really highly attractive, high social ranking, highly influential women are looking to impress, they actually like the makeup. So these women at the top who are encouraging all of these makeup fads for everyone beneath them to wear, they're not actually even bearing a cost. The men they're not interested in who are lower down the hierarchy don't like it, but they don't like those men. So the opinion of those men is irrelevant to them. So in that particular instance, you've sort of got a situation where the elite women are doing something that for the majority of men would bear an attractiveness cost for them. They're very attractive anyway, so they're probably going to still be fine. The people below them then have to follow these fashions and these trends, and that imposes a cost on all the men who are trying to chase those women. So now we've got this asymmetrical cost. But then the last piece of the puzzle is that the really attractive men have come to the party and gone, you know what, I don't mind it. You want to wear all that Okay, go for it. It doesn't bother me. I'm fine. And so you've just now got this situation where the highly attractive women can do something which for everyone else imposes a cost and for them it doesn't even impose a cost.

[13:54–15:31] Why average men don't find makeup attractive:

men as a general rule don't tend to find a lot of the things that women do as part of intrasexual competitiveness attractive. And I think a big part of that is because intrasexual competitiveness correlates reasonably strongly with the dark tetrad with all four traits of the dark tetrad. Women engaging in any sort of indicator of intrasexual competitiveness, whether it's dolling themselves up all the time, generally being aggressive with other women, you know, always causing drama in the girls, whatever it might be. I think men are generally put off by all that because it's a little bit of a red flag that she's potentially not going to make a great mother just because people that are high on the tetrad tend not to do that. So, there's that personality indicator. When it comes specifically to makeup though, I think there's probably another explanation that's relevant and that is that when women are wearing makeup, they're covering stuff and the face is an extremely, you know, high information source of rating someone. And so effectively, if you're covering that up, then you're depriving men of the ability to make the kinds of mate value judgments and mating choices that I would otherwise make... You're just degrading the information signal.

[17:37–18:30] Men compete like a running race:

that fundamental asymmetry is the same logic as to why female and male intrasexual competition is so different. When men compete with each other, in terms of intrasexual competition, it's much more like a running race. So, men tend to stay in their own lane, look forwards, run as hard and as fast as they can and try to get the prize, right? They don't spend a lot of time worrying about what their competitors in the other lane are doing. And the reason for that is that the reproductive payoff of worrying about what your competitors are doing just wouldn't be there for men.

[18:23–19:15] Reproductive success is relative:

the reproductive payoff is your own reproductive success compared against the background population reproductive success. It's not just your own. It's your own compared against the population background reproductive success... populations can grow, populations can shrink, but the lineages that are winning the evolutionary game at any point in time are those that have a more than their fair share representation in the next generation. Whether the overall population is growing or shrinking, they're the lineages that are going to get selected for. So yes, reproductive success is relative.

[19:15–20:32] Why sabotage doesn't pay for men but does for women:

men are not going to be able to do anything about the background reproductive rate by sabotaging rivals... unless they're going to go around and sabotage huge numbers of rivals and try to impact that background reproductive rate, it's not going to be of any benefit to them. If they could sabotage a particular rival in such a way that they could then steal some of that rival's reproductive success, that's different... But if we're talking about trying to get a gain just by changing that denominator, the overall background reproductive success, that's not something that is in the control of men. But that is something that is in the control of women. So... because they are in fact the rate setters of reproductive success, every individual woman that you knock out of the race has a marginal impact on background reproductive rate. Whether you steal the reproduction she would have had or not, ultimately that background reproductive rate is going to drop. And so when you've got large numbers of women trying to kick large numbers of other women out, you end up with measurable effects. And so the payoff matrix for men and women in terms of sabotaging others is very very different.

[20:42–21:05] The female "sprint race":

if men are engaging in like a sprint race in terms of their intrasexual competition, then the equivalent female sprint race is a whole bunch of women not going anywhere, fighting with each other at the starting line, trying to hold everybody else back. That's the female equivalent. Women put much more effort into sabotaging other women's mate value, mating efforts, reproductive output, mothering, etc., than men do.

[21:12–22:08] The tribe illustration:

for men, the way that that works is if say you're in a tribe and you were to kill 10 of the men around you, that doesn't really make a difference because other men could still impregnate — one man could impregnate 10 women. The way the numbers work are just different. Whereas if you're a woman in a tribe and you sabotage one woman, that's a whole set of potential reproduction that's just stopped... It's not going to get replaced. If we assume that the women in the population are reproducing at whatever is capacity... then if you knock someone out, other women are not going to fill in and take that reproductive success. It's just going to be lost. And so women knocking each other out can have a measurable effect on that denominator, the background reproductive rate.

[22:34–23:56] Counter-selection from male mate choice:

Host: So if this is correlated with dark triad and it's genetic then we would see more and more of these successful highly competitive women having more and more kids and the population of women would grow more competitive over time.

Sulikowski: Yes, to some extent but there's also like I said men don't tend to like female intrasexual competition. And so there is obviously counter selection pressures. So everything comes with a trade-off. So there [are] all the selection pressures that would favor women engaging in these types of behavior, but at the same time there are counter selection pressures coming from male mate choice that curb a lot of this behavior. So this is one of the reasons why female behavior tends to be quite much worse when there are not men around. So women's reputations is done a lot of harm if men are seeing this kind of super nasty sort of behavior. So that sort of drives that perception at least that women are much more catty when it's just a group of women than when it's a mixed sex group because there's a lot of reputation damage to be done because men do not find this type of behavior typically appealing. So that's like the counter selection that in some senses keeps it in check.

[42:01–42:54] Host's question and dismissal of "modern environment" arguments:

Host: I'm amazed at the abstraction, too. Like, in your study, you found that these women weren't ever going to meet the hairdressing client, so to speak. And yet even a woman who they'll never actually compete with in the real world, there's already this sense of competition even when it's so abstract. How can that be? Are we just not adapted for the abstractions of the world today?

Sulikowski: No, I don't think that's got much to do with — I mean that's kind of a separate conversation, but I don't give really a lot of weight at all to any of the arguments in that particular bucket. So the idea that we live in an environment that's not natural. So biology and evolved psychological dispositions and things are now just all a bit crazy and haywire and not matching the environment. And all sorts of other things like that — that we've got culture and that somehow interferes with it. None of those things I think hold any water.

[43:02–44:33] How selection actually works:

I don't think it's to do with today's distractions or any of the other kind of modern explanations that people tend to want to use to just sort of wholesale dismiss evolutionary determinants of human behavior. In terms of the ever-present intrasexual competition, that's exactly what you would expect to happen. So you've got the entirety of every species, every individual has been selected for maximum relative reproductive success. And so that doesn't mean that individuals run around being little reproductive maximizers because what gets selected for are the mechanisms that produce the most reproductive success the most often. So you don't necessarily have perfect concordance — not just in humans but in any species — between the particular mechanisms of an individual and the specific features of the environment that they currently find themselves in. So you don't necessarily get every single behavior, every single decision reflecting some perfect theoretical optimal. That definitely doesn't happen. That's not a human situation. That's just behavior. That's just agent behavior in a complex environment. So not everything is necessarily optimal all the time, but everything happens because of mechanisms that have been selected for because they were most successful most of the time.

[44:33–45:46] Sabotage as the baseline expectation:

the baseline expectation that you should have is that at all times individuals are engaging in the types of behaviors that on balance maximize reproductive success. Which means that you should expect baseline behavior of women — if a big part of female reproductive success is being able to effectively suppress the reproductive success of others, whether that's through sabotage or whatever your mechanism might be, then you should expect women to be taking every available opportunity to do that. So why would you predict anything else? Now there are counter selection pressures. Women form these alliances and if you're not in an alliance with other women then you're kicked out, socially ostracized, and that's bad and women have to avoid that. So that creates selection pressures to cooperate. But again why would you expect a hairdresser who has no personal relationship to want to cooperate with the client? You wouldn't. So that only leaves sabotage.

[45:46–47:25] Intrasexual competition as a fundamental organizing principle:

what gets missed about intrasexual competition in women is that it's not something that happens some of the time on occasion. It is a fundamental organizing principle of female interactions. Every other female is either related to you and thus you have a positive interest in her reproductive success — or she's not related to you which makes her a rival. And if she's a rival, then you've got a complicated set of interactions where she may be able to be an ally, there may be some cooperation there or there may not. But you cannot opt out of intrasexual competition any more than you can opt out of social signaling. It is a fundamental organizing principle. And the same thing happens for men. Men are always engaging in intrasexual competition. It just looks different. It's much more showoffy — who's got the bigger muscles, who's got the nicer car, who's got the suavest dress. But because so much of male intrasexual competition is not directly interactive, it's just competing in that showoff way. You don't necessarily see that same level of just underlying aggression by default between men. Whereas for women... as much as male intrasexual competition is individual focused, female intrasexual competition is rival focused. And every other woman out there is a rival to some extent. So it's the fundamental organizing principle of female interactions. Everyone is a rival. With some rivals, you can cooperate, you can compete. With others, you need to be really submissive and just let her go because you don't want to be the target. So you just bow out. And other women you have a relationship with, in which case you have a positive interest in their reproductive success, and so you get genuine kin-selected cooperation. But you cannot just reimagine a scenario in which it doesn't exist.

[50:18–50:59] Host's question and the two-arm framing:

Host: we've talked a lot about how female intrasexual competition hurts other women. I've heard you talk about how branding men and masculinity as toxic is female intrasexual competition. How does that work?

Sulikowski: I think there's two things going on. The two main separate arms of the explanation. The first one I think is where it started and that I think is just corruption of female mate preferences. So corruption of rivals' mate preferences.

[55:50–56:51] The "men are bad" rhetoric:

right from the earliest sort of feminist writings there's plenty of signals through there that men are bad. Right from the most extreme versions — there's a quite famous quote of one suggesting that we needed to keep the male population to a maximum of 10%. And right through to the less extreme rhetoric which is less about just trying to keep men as some form of minority livestock — the less extreme forms which is just, you know, marriage is a form of oppression and motherhood is a form of oppression. And so we've had this anti-male rhetoric feeding through. And we've seen it become more and more intense in recent years.

[56:51–58:13] Toxic masculinity and schools:

to the point where we've now got this notion of toxic masculinity being thrown around — even to the point where it's become so mainstream and so accepted that... certainly here and in the UK there's now programs being introduced in primary and secondary schools to effectively teach boys not to [be] toxic. So it's reached enough of a critical mass, this idea that effectively boys and men left uneducated will just naturally develop into toxic men and we somehow need to do active work with our young boys and men to re-educate them to prevent that. That's an extraordinarily extreme view that has managed to creep its way in bit by bit and become rather mainstream and not — it does not alarm nearly enough people enough. It's like the frog in the lukewarm water that you slowly increase the temperature and the frog doesn't notice that he's boiling.

[58:14–59:50] The core mechanism — attacking the traits that make good husbands:

what it is attacking is all of the aspects of men that make them good husbands and good fathers and good protectors and good providers. So what started off as demonizing those parts of men that women actually should be looking for in a partner — to corrupt female mate choice and to encourage women to make suboptimal choices and to encourage women, instead of seeing those as a green flag in a prospective partner, was teaching women to see those as red flags. So again, a corruption of female mate choice. And it's now run to the point where men are actually being effectively shut down. We're now actually talking about in a really incredibly dystopian sense introducing some sort of formal education for boys that teaches them basically that they can't be masculine at all. Which of course is profoundly awful for the individual boys and profoundly grim in terms of looking forward for the rest of society as well. You can't have a functioning society without strong masculine men and a lot of them. Which is sort of the endgame of all of this nonsense — a very non-functioning society.

[1:10:15–1:11:02] The thesis — increased intensity of intrasexual competition:

Host: let's talk about population... we had talked a little bit before we started recording about the changes in birth rates, decline in birth rates. What do you think that is and how does it relate to your work?

Sulikowski: What I think is happening is the inevitable result of this sort of increased intensity of female intrasexual competition and reproductive suppression. So much of intrasexual competition is geared towards sabotage anyway, much of it involves reproductive suppression either directly or indirectly. And what we're seeing now is — because of the levels of hostility towards men, because of the destruction of the courtship rituals, because of the scandalization of courtship...

[1:11:02–1:11:57] Inversion of what's scandalous:

what you're seeing is the descandalization of things that should be sexual scandals. So a male colleague interested in you and attempting to flirt with you or test the water can be completely inappropriate workplace behavior, and he's obviously entirely toxic. But women going out on Saturday night and having sex with a different man every Saturday night, that's girl boss behavior and that's perfectly fine... So respectfully approaching a colleague at work because you're interested in them — that's scandalous. But having random sex with people you don't know, that's perfectly fine.

[1:12:03–1:13:32] The environment hostile to reproduction:

what we're seeing is an environment that is just completely hostile to reproductive success. It's hostile to the formation of long-term partnerships. It's very conducive to short-term sexual behavior which can certainly produce children but tends not to, especially in an environment that comes with pretty readily available contraception... But even if it produces pregnancies, it does not tend to lead to excellent reproductive success. There is definitely a quality difference between the output from children that you get in a stable pair-bond relationship versus children that are had [outside one] — it's one of the most well-known findings, any kind of outcome measure you want to measure for the ultimate well-being and life success of those children. It's just a world between if they're single mom families versus parent families... the world is laid out for people who have a double income but no kids. That's the economic unit that can survive in the world.

[1:13:32–1:14:17] The three coordinated arms:

there's a couple of other things going on at the same time. One is the attack on men... the other arm is actually the emasculation of men in society. So now what we've got is an emasculation of men. We've got declining birth rates. And then the third phenomenon that we're seeing is what Helen Andrews called the feminization of the institutions.

[1:14:17–1:15:21] Women disinvesting in motherhood:

what we're seeing there is women, because of a declining birth rate and an environment that's incredibly hostile to reproduction, we are seeing many many women investing many more hours in non-motherhood activities. Typically in their careers but also just in general civic life. Now there's a very obvious mathematical trade-off there. If the sex that is the rate limiting sex of your population chooses to invest huge amounts of time in something other than reproduction, then reproductive rates are going to fall. That's unavoidable. But obviously that's not the only reason that reproductive rates are falling. There's all these other aspects of our current society that are hostile to reproduction, hostile to long-term relationships, hostile to families, and hostile to women investing in motherhood. So it's not just a consequence of 'oh, women started working, so of course the birth rate has to go down.' It's not that simple. There's a complex system playing out.

[1:15:21–1:17:32] Institutions dismantled from within:

you've got women disinvesting in reproduction and motherhood. You've got men being emasculated, which is bad news for any society. And then the third arm is you have got the institutions effectively being dismantled from within. And the people who are dismantling them from within are the women. Helen Andrews laid out... a tremendous job of laying out the impacts that women are having in institutions as soon as they reach some sort of critical mass. She was suggesting that critical mass was like 50% employment. I think you need less. I don't think the changes that women bring into these workplaces that end up effectively just gutting the institutions from the inside are brought in using democratic means... it is a minority of women that are driving these types of changes. But because women are very averse to the risks of relational aggression, many women will go along with them and not push back. However, whether it's 50% or something lower, women in these institutions reach some sort of critical mass and the institutions begin to shut themselves down. They stop prioritizing outcomes, performance and merit and they start prioritizing things that are unrelated to performance, outcome and merit. Some people call them feelings and social cohesion. I'm not sure if you've ever been in a female dominated workplace — they're not nice. People's feelings are not being prioritized. That may be the story they tell under the banner of DEI, but that's not actually an accurate description of what's going on in those workplaces.

[1:17:32–1:18:51] What dismantling looks like across institutions:

the outcomes of it are exactly as Helen Andrews described, which is that they become less productive. They become more bloated. Whatever they're meant to be doing becomes extraordinarily biased. So when we're talking about courts of law, the value of evidence degrades, the value of the legal decisions degrades. They become ideologically motivated. When you're talking about universities, academic freedom degrades, diversity of opinion degrades, the merit of the argument becomes less important, and all becomes ideologically aligned. We're seeing it in politics, we're seeing it in media, we're seeing it in hospitals. We're seeing it in all of the load-bearing institutions that support our civilization. So my argument is not that we have a simple birth rate decline and then that's going to lead to the effective collapse of civilization. What we've actually got is quite a complex system with different components that are all working coherently to bring civilization down. And when I see a number of different components all working together coherently to bring civilization down, you're not looking at something crashing and burning. You're looking at something being systematically dismantled and packed up. So there has to be an explanation for why that would happen. It's not an accident. It's not just a confluence of a number of unfortunate things coming together. It's a system that is doing this for a reason and serving a purpose.

[1:18:51–1:20:50] Reproductive success as musical chairs:

the reason that I've come up with goes back to relative reproductive success. If you imagine reproductive success as being like a really grim game of musical chairs — when you've got a population where we're starting to see birth rates declining, every generation there's not enough chairs. And so every generation some lineages fall out. The ones that are left have got therefore just by definition a larger share of the proportion of representation in that generation. So every round of musical chairs that happens, the individuals who are left there in that generation have got a bigger and bigger share of the prize. It's like those lottery game shows... as you get down to fewer and fewer players, they'll each get a bigger share, and at some point the players can agree to stop playing... 'we're not going to play, we're just going to split the prize three ways.' The same thing happens reproductively with these lineages. As the population shrinks, your share of the remainder population is huge, but you're in an environment that is incredibly hostile to reproductive success. And the number of chairs in every generation is going to be smaller and smaller. So at the moment, you've made it towards nearly the end. You're nearly a winner. So you're now very motivated to have someone call the end of the game so that you are here at the end and are not one of the lineages that gets knocked out right before the game ends. So as we reach this end, the emergent behavior that comes from people is actually hastening on the end because the end is the big genetic prize.

[1:21:03–1:22:14] The bottleneck and the explosion:

civilizations die, people often don't. Many individuals die, but the population then gets invaded or gets subsumed. And it explodes. That's the genetic prize. You might be one of 100,000 lineages to begin with. If that population shrinks down to only a few thousand lineages and you're one of those and then explodes again, your lineage has gone from a tiny representation to a tremendous representation in the next population. And because the next population came from the people who brought this on and initiated it and made it happen, those genes are what then explodes, and everyone else is now playing the same game of musical chairs. You don't realize you're playing it at the beginning. No one's noticed. It's because there's billions of chairs. But eventually there will be fewer and fewer chairs and we'll do it again. And that's why civilization does not look like it's falling — well, it looks like it's falling, but it's being dismantled.

[1:22:14–1:23:35] No puppet master needed:

Governments, institutions, universities, the media as collectives are all behaving in ways that are exacerbating the problem and promoting it. They're not behaving in ways that are halting it or recognizing it or turning it around. They're all sort of cooperating. And I think this is why what's happening for a lot of people looks like some giant conspiracy theory. It looks like, oh, there must be some overarching puppet masters that are doing all of this because all these things are going to bring on the collapse of society and they're all in favor of them and it's mental and it's insane. But you don't need that puppet master to explain what's happening. These behaviors are just the emergent properties of this type of reproductive system. When you start to get down to a few lineages, those lineages want to bring on the end of the game to make sure that they're still there at the end. They want the game to end while they're still in it. And that's what we're seeing. We're seeing our society pick itself up and pack itself up and go home so that all the ones that are still here now will be the beginning of whatever comes next.

[1:23:44–1:24:38] Why emasculation is the load-bearing piece:

this is part of why I think it's so important for this system to work in this way, that men are being emasculated. Because masculine men won't let this happen. And in fact, we can see in different parts of the world where this is becoming more and more obvious to individual people, we are seeing masculine men begin to self-organize and try to resist this. Masculine men will not sit by and watch this happen. Which is why in order for this kind of a system to function in this way, men have to become emasculated so that you don't have enough men left to defend the civilization. You have to have men who are not prepared to do that in order to let this happen.

[1:24:43–1:25:46] Reproductive success is shared 50/50:

there's a really important principle, and that is that every single child born is the child of a mother and a father. Reproductive success is by definition shared 50% across men and women. So there cannot be a strategy that on the whole is better for women than it is for men, because if women are getting reproductive success, an exactly equal number of men are getting that same reproductive success. Now there might be a particular strategy that is good for a particular man that might be bad for the particular women he is interacting with, but if that's going to produce offspring there will be women who will be the mothers of those offspring. So when we've got women [where] female manipulative reproductive suppression is driving this — well, that's because female reproduction is much easier to suppress than men. If a system like this is going to emerge, it's going to be the women that are going to have to be responsible for the reproductive suppression because that's a much easier pathway to it.

[1:26:55–1:28:37] The gene's-eye view — men sacrificed to preserve lineages:

when you're thinking evolutionarily you need to step back even from the individual and just start thinking about the genes and the lineages. The individual is just the body that carries those genes for a while. The genes are playing this game over multiple generations. So the genes don't care too much if all the copies of them in men have to effectively be sacrificed in order to preserve the copies of them in women. That's absolutely fine. And so from an overall perspective, what you're seeing largely is men being sort of turned into a type of man that won't resist this in order to facilitate the system. And that's where the men are ostensibly as cooperative in the takedown of these institutions and whatnot as women are. You need to have that critical mass of women in the institutions for these things to happen. And these things don't happen when they're male-dominated workplaces. But when you do get that critical mass of women and these things begin to happen, you don't see the men standing up en masse and revolting and stopping it. They go along with it and they help and they cooperate. So it really is a coherent system where all the players in it — with the exception of a minority — the majority of the players in it are behaving in such a way as to bring on this bottleneck, to bring on the collapse, and to bring on the explosion for as long as they still exist in the population.

Summary

The thesis Sulikowski develops over the interview is unusually load-bearing. It begins with a small empirical finding about hairdressers and ends with a model of civilizational collapse. The chain that connects them is a single asymmetry — that women are the rate-limiting sex of reproduction — and a single restraint that has historically held the worst of female intrasexual competition in check: male mate choice. The argument lives or dies by that restraint, which is why the final section about emasculation is doing most of the explanatory work.

The asymmetry

Reproductive success is relative. A lineage's success is its share of the next generation, not its absolute count. Men and women face this same fitness function but with very different ways to influence it. A man maximizes his share by maximizing his own offspring count — by competing for mates. He has no good way to suppress the denominator (the background reproductive rate) because removing rivals doesn't reduce how many children get born; some other man fills in. So male intrasexual competition looks like a sprint race in lanes: showoff signals, who's got the bigger muscles, the nicer car, the suavest dress.

A woman cannot expand her share the same way — her absolute ceiling on offspring is low and biologically fixed. Her best lever is the denominator. Knocking a rival woman out of the reproductive race actually reduces the background reproductive rate, because women are the bottleneck. Other women don't fill in. So female intrasexual competition is "a whole bunch of women not going anywhere, fighting with each other at the starting line, trying to hold everybody else back."

The hairdresser study is the small empirical version of this. Women, told to advise a stranger they will never meet, advise her to cut more hair off when she has explicitly said she wants it kept long — and they do this most strongly toward clients they perceive as their attractiveness equals. There is no mating motive in the room, no men, no rival they will ever encounter. Sabotage is the default operating mode, not an exception called up by specific provocations. As Sulikowski puts it: intrasexual competition is "a fundamental organizing principle of female interactions." Every unrelated woman is a rival; with some you can cooperate, with others you bow out, but you cannot opt out.

The handicap principle

The peacock's tail is the model. A male peacock who survives despite hauling around a parasite-bait spectacle must be unusually robust — the handicap is the proof. The female version, Sulikowski argues, is that high-mate-value women set fashions and styles that cost their rivals more than they cost themselves. Pixie cuts are her cleanest example. Long hair signals health (longer hair is harder to keep parasite-free) and gives women flexibility in sexual signaling (up = unavailable, down = available). Short hair gives up both. A genuinely attractive woman can absorb that loss; her social capital cushions her. But once she pulls less-attractive imitators into the trend, the cost lands harder on them.

Makeup runs on the same machinery. Her unpublished study found that on the whole men do not find makeup more attractive than no makeup — they find it less attractive. Women, on the whole, find it more attractive. The one subset of men who do like makeup are men who self-rate as very high in mate value. So the elite women at the top of the female social hierarchy are wearing something that the men they care to impress (the alphas) don't mind, that other women below them must copy, and that the men those other women want to attract are turned off by. Asymmetric cost, paid by the rivals, not by the originators. This is the same logic as fashion in general: clothes are "never flattering" because flattering wouldn't work — the point is to impose a mate-value cost on whoever has to keep up.

Why men dislike female competitive signaling

This is the load-bearing piece that gets overlooked. Sulikowski offers two reasons average men dislike makeup and competitive female display, and the first matters more than the second. Intrasexual competitiveness in women correlates strongly with the dark tetrad — all four traits. Men reading these signals are not just registering a cosmetic preference; they are reading personality. Drama-causing, constantly-dolled-up, aggressive-toward-other-women behavior is a real predictor of dark-tetrad traits, which in turn predict bad mothering. Men have evolved to flinch from it because, on average, the women displaying it would be worse partners and worse mothers.

The second reason is information-degrading: makeup hides face information, and the face is one of the highest-information signals available for mate assessment. Men want the unaltered signal.

The first reason is the one with civilizational consequences, because it means male mate choice is the natural brake on runaway female competitive sabotage. Sulikowski states this explicitly: counter-selection from male mate preferences "curbs a lot of this behavior." Women's reputations are damaged when men see this kind of nasty behavior, "which is why women's behavior tends to be much worse when there are not men around." The catty female-only environment isn't a stereotype — it's what happens when the restraint is absent. In a mixed-sex group the restraint is on, and the worst of the behavior gets suppressed.

This is the homeostatic mechanism. Selection pressures exist that would otherwise drive women toward higher and higher levels of competitive sabotage, dark-tetrad-style. Male mate choice acts against this. As long as men retain the ability and the inclination to reject women who present those traits, the system stays bounded.

What happens when the brake is removed

The interview's larger claim is that the brake has been removed, and that this is what we are watching now. The mechanism is a two-armed attack.

The first arm corrupts female mate preferences. The traits being branded as toxic masculinity — protectiveness, providership, leadership, the willingness to take action — are precisely the traits that mark good husbands and good fathers. Women are taught to see green flags as red flags. Courtship rituals — the small graces that gave men and women a shared low-stakes language for testing interest — are smeared as benevolent sexism and dismantled. What remains is no shared signal, no agreed protocol, and asymmetric punishment for any man who guesses wrong about whether to approach. The payoff matrix for men trying to court tilts toward not bothering.

The second arm emasculates men directly. Schools introduce programs to teach boys "not to be toxic" — i.e., not to be masculine — on the premise that left to themselves boys naturally develop into toxic men. This is the upstream intervention. Without masculine men in numbers, the natural counter-selection vanishes. Men who would have rejected dark-tetrad-correlated female competitive behavior either no longer recognize it as such, no longer feel entitled to act on their preferences, or simply aren't there in sufficient numbers to matter.

This is why Sulikowski places so much weight on emasculation as the load-bearing piece. The entire homeostatic system depends on masculine men exercising mate choice. "Masculine men won't let this happen" — and where they still exist in sufficient numbers, they don't. Where they have been thinned out and re-educated, the runaway begins.

The endgame

Once the brake is off, the rest follows mechanically. Female intrasexual competition, no longer counter-selected, runs hotter. Women disinvest in motherhood. Institutions reach a critical mass of women and begin shutting themselves down — courts, universities, media, hospitals, politics — replacing performance and merit with ideological alignment. (Sulikowski thinks Helen Andrews' 50% threshold is too high; she suspects the changes set in earlier, because they are not democratic but driven by an aggressive minority that the rest go along with to avoid relational aggression.) Birth rates fall. The world reorganizes around the double-income-no-kids economic unit.

The musical-chairs framing explains why this looks coordinated without requiring a coordinator. Once birth rates start falling, each surviving lineage's share of the next generation grows. The closer the population gets to a bottleneck, the more those remaining lineages benefit from the game ending while they are still in it. The emergent behavior of the surviving players is to hasten the collapse — not consciously, but as the natural consequence of the incentive landscape. Civilizations die, but specific lineages survive, get subsumed or invaded, and then explode again with a much higher representation than they started with. No puppet master required. What looks like coordinated demolition is the unforced behavior of a system whose homeostatic mechanism has been disabled.

The gene's-eye view rounds it out. Every child has a mother and a father, so reproductive success is mathematically shared 50/50 between the sexes — the strategy cannot be net-better for women than for men in the long run. The genes don't care which sex carries them forward. If the system requires that male copies of those genes be turned into a non-resisting type of man so that the female copies can preserve the lineage through the bottleneck, the genes are indifferent. The emasculation is not collateral damage. It is the design feature.

The shape of the argument

What makes the argument worth taking seriously is that it doesn't need a conspiracy. It needs only three things: that female intrasexual competition is the default mode of female social behavior, that male mate choice has historically counter-selected its dark-tetrad-correlated forms, and that this counter-selection has been deliberately or accidentally disabled by emasculating men and corrupting female mate preferences. The first is documented in the hairdresser study and reinforced by every "intrasexual competition is the fundamental organizing principle" passage. The second is the underweighted middle of the argument — men don't dislike makeup as a taste claim, they dislike it as a personality-detection signal. The third is the load-bearing claim of the final section, and it is the one Sulikowski rests the most weight on: the only reason the runaway is possible at all is that the natural brake — masculine men exercising mate choice — has been disabled.

Whether the endgame plays out as a musical-chairs bottleneck or as something slower and messier is a separate question. But the explanation for why the disassembly is happening, and why it looks like coordinated demolition without a director, falls out of one fact: when you turn off the counter-selection, the underlying dynamic is no longer bounded.