Are Incels A Threat To Society? - William Costello

1. 0:00 – 0:24

   Intro

   1. WCWilliam Costello0:00

      Compared to 2002, men overall had the same number of partners in 2013, but the top 20% of men had a 25% increase in sexual partners, and the top 5% of men had an even more dramatic 38% increase. It really is that kind of effective polygyny towards the top th- the minority of men th- the chads are actually cleaning up.

2. 0:24 – 10:04

   Intentionally Childless Women

   1. WCWilliam Costello0:24

      (laughs)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:24

      "A growing number of women are choosing not to have kids, and as a result, are advancing in their careers and using their wealth to buy property and travel more." This is an article by Bloomberg, I think. It came out of their Business Week edition. "Ashley Marrero isn't married and doesn't have kids, and she has a message for women just like her, you can still have it all. 'I love my life and feel very fulfilled,' says Marrero, who froze her eggs in 2018 to keep her options open. The 43-year-old feels a deep sense of satisfaction from her job as a sales representative for a maker of medical devices, which brings her into contact with patients, and she relishes all of the lifestyle and financial freedoms that come with being a single, child-free woman in a well-paying job. Marrero, who was married for four years before getting divorced in 2008, enjoys an enviable degree of financial independence. The West Village resident owns her own apartment she bought in 2019 for around $900,000 and then renovated, and in June, she closed on a summer home in New Jersey's Long Beach Island with her sister Christina, who is a few years older and also single with no kids. Ashley figures she's taken 10 trips in the last 12 months and often friends with a large group of about 25 people who are largely unmarried and don't have children." Those trips, at 43, sound like they suck.

   3. WCWilliam Costello1:37

      (laughs)

   4. CWChris Williamson1:37

      I do not want to go on that trip, frankly.

   5. WCWilliam Costello1:42

      Yeah, so everything you just described there is kind of like a- a symptom of what, uh, I would call the wider mating crisis, and it seems to be like a- a cultural kind of prioritizing of the male default of economic success, the kind of girlboss, lean-in kind of culture seems to be set up as what a- the vision for success for women, uh, tends to be, and yet you have a lot of even corporate giants kind of getting in on this. Um, a few years ago, you had Morgan Stanley, the investment bankers put out a report that forecasts that 45% of prime working-age women between the ages of 25 and 44 will be single and childless, uh, by 2030, the largest share, uh, in history. And, uh, it's not entirely obvious to me that this is in women's best interest. I mean, I'm pretty libertarian in my sensibilities about, you know, freedom of choice for whatever someone wants to do with their life, um, but i- i- it seems to me like a- you can see the kind of corporate interest in, uh, opening up more worker drones for 60-hour work weeks, uh, that, you know, the- the workplace now, women are crushing it. It's a brain-based economy rather than a brawn-based economy. So, uh, that- that seems to be in their interests. And it's weird, it's like- it's almost like Huxley, and it's like Brave New World. Ha- have you read that, Chris?

   6. CWChris Williamson3:00

      Yes.

   7. WCWilliam Costello3:01

      Yeah, so it's very Huxley, and it's like, um, this kind of hedonistic life of going on lots of trips, having very atomized type of sex, singlehood will be on the rise, you won't get attached to any one person, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy, that- that kind of thing. And it seems a little bit dystopian to me, um, to kind of, you know, to hurtle towards that, uh, dystopian vision. But, uh, that- that's the- the modern mating crisis we find ourselves in and, uh, yeah, th- that- that's where we are.

   8. CWChris Williamson3:30

      Why do you think this male default has come about? Because it's something that I've noticed as well. The typically masculine traits are the ones that would have been held by men, the conscientiousness, the disagreeability, the casual sex, the ability to move on and not really catch feels and not be emotional-

   9. WCWilliam Costello3:49

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CWChris Williamson3:49

       ... to focus on possessions and drive fast cars. What- what is it that's causing that to be imbibed by women and also pushed to them by culture?

   11. WCWilliam Costello4:00

       Mm. So actually, women are generally a bit more conscientious than men, um, but yeah, I agree with you that it's kind of flipping to that default. And I think it is just a, uh, an organic backlash to kind of, uh, what we might describe as the historic oppression of women socioeconomically. Uh, you know, it's kind of a leaning into that freedom almost, uh, at too fast a pace. It's like one speed go, foot to the floor on girlboss mode. Um, and y- you know, you have the corporate giants kind of playing into that and, uh, yeah, it's just a kind of a- a situation where for the first time maybe in history, men and women aren't relying on each other as obviously as, uh, in the past. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's kind of more individualistic kind of, uh, world now where kind of, uh, you know, atomized and away from our kin in big cities across the world, uh, which is very evolutionarily novel. Um, so yeah, I think it- it's just a- an ordinary, uh, somewhat expected backlash to maybe the oppression of the past.

   12. CWChris Williamson5:02

       Like the, uh, child of the Christian parents that moves out and immediately gets a nose piercing and a bunch of tattoos and swings back the other way. Okay, continuing on with that article. "Single women without kids had an average of $65,000 in wealth in 2019 compared with $57,000 for single childfree men."

   13. WCWilliam Costello5:21

       Mm-hmm.

   14. CWChris Williamson5:21

       Single women without kids, 65,000, 57,000 for single childfree men. So we already have something there that kind of pushes back against the commonly held, uh, worldview. Uh, the difference is, for single mothers, the figure was only $7,000. "Parenthood was losing its appeal even before COVID-19. US birthrates had been falling for the past 30 years. In 1990, there were around 71 births per year for every thousand women aged 15 to 44. By 2019, that had dropped to 58." So from 71 to 58, which is a pretty big drop. "Some women opting not to have kids are enjoying an enviable degree of financial freedom." She's got all of her different houses. "The childless life does have its drawbacks. People who are single and childfree pay more in taxes, and housing is a lot harder to afford-"

   15. WCWilliam Costello6:10

       (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson6:10

       "... on one income than two, especially with home prices and rents at record high and mortgage rates on the rise." So...... that's the problem that Bloomberg can find with potentially going to your grave with no one else that's part of your genetic kin there to, to see you, is the fact that you're gonna pay more in, in taxes and, and housing is more difficult to afford.

   17. WCWilliam Costello6:32

       Yeah, it's very corporate kind of language, isn't it, that the main concern would be, how do we get around that, that one stumbling block of the taxes?

   18. CWChris Williamson6:39

       (laughs)

   19. WCWilliam Costello6:39

       Um, but I was glad that, uh, she did at least highlight, uh, the idea of buying a house on a single income, 'cause that's something I always highlight for incels, that that's a double whammy kind of a circular punishment. It's hard to get a house, uh, if you're a, a single man on one income, and a lot of incels, uh, are on l- lower income or no income at all. Um, you almost need to be part of a dual-earning household to get a mortgage. So, without the house, you can't get the girlfriend. Without the girlfriend, you can't get the house. So, it feels like a little bit of a, a circular punishment for incels there. Um, but yeah, that's a, you, you can hear the corporate language dripping in, in, in, in, in that, uh, account.

   20. CWChris Williamson7:18

       It's, it really does rile me up, man. The fact that women who choose to be mothers are being seen as second-class rubes that have been, I don't know, gazumped into taking a role that was just some ancestral old version of what womanhood was supposed to be. You can go out and be a boss bitch. You can get over your last boyfriend by getting under your next one. Like, all of this-

   21. WCWilliam Costello7:40

       Mm-hmm.

   22. CWChris Williamson7:40

       ... sort of rhetoric to me doesn't sound massively empowering. Louise Perry's book, Case Against the Sexual Revolution, is phenomenal at this. Like, loveless sex is not empowering-

   23. WCWilliam Costello7:49

       (clears throat)

   24. CWChris Williamson7:49

       ... and teaching women that they should be able to try and compete with men on having loveless sex, only one gender is going to win that, right? It's not going to be the women. Men-

   25. WCWilliam Costello7:58

       Mm-hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson7:58

       ... are going to continue to run through girls when they can and leave them behind. And, I don't know, I just feel like there needs to be the, the pushback or the swing back against past disadvantages that women have had is not making women's lives any better. I think that you can comfortably say that enabling women to earn more in the workplace was fantastic. The vote, the pill, the washing machine, all of this stuff.

   27. WCWilliam Costello8:25

       (clears throat)

   28. CWChris Williamson8:25

       Like, things that genuinely liberated women from the previous constraints that they had were worthy. I struggle to see how encouraging women to see the new pair of Gucci shoes that they've got, that they buy from a job that they hate to impress people that they don't like, as being the highest point of contribution of their life, and that the mothers are somehow second-class citizens.

   29. WCWilliam Costello8:47

       Yeah. And it certainly is, like, it, it almost seems like a concerted war on motherhood. Even, uh, last week, there was a, an article, or, uh, over the weekend in The New York Times about the myth of the maternal instinct, and it talked about how, uh, you know, this, uh, this is a manmade phenomenon, culturally, kind of a cultural script that we all buy into. And people were just highlighting how ridiculous this is. Now, I think there might be a little bit of... Uh, I can give a little bit of a charitable interpretation to that article, uh, in that the myth of m- maternal instinct isn't just one thing. So, m- maternal instinct is probably more accurate. So, maternal instincts could sometimes, depending on, uh, the age of the woman, uh, her marital situation, uh, her socioeconomic status, that maternal instinct might even be infanticide. So, you know, it's a, it's a suite of instincts that are kind of activated in, in, in different situations, like all of our evolved psychology, isn't it? It's not just on or off. It, it's just, uh, in which environment it comes o- uh, on play.

   30. CWChris Williamson9:50

       As I said-
3. 10:04 – 16:18

   Are There Female Incels?

   1. CWChris Williamson10:04

   2. WCWilliam Costello10:04

      (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson10:04

      ... so, would you say women who can't find a mate that they're attracted to are a kind of incel?

   4. WCWilliam Costello10:10

      Right. So I get asked this all the time. Uh, it's, uh, it's funny, when I, whenever you pick a topic to research, like incels, one of the first questions is, "What about the femcels?" Well, for my study, I can only find nine femcels, and I would like to maybe do, um, a, a femcel study one day. And my thinking on this has evolved somewhat. Initially, I would kind of agree with the incel line that they would say, there's no real such thing as, uh, uh, there's no such thing as a, a real femcel in the same way as an incel, because most women can go out and get sex or a relationship if they want. It might not be the sex or love or relationship that they want, but they can get something. And for incels, I think this is a real failure of cross-sex mind reading. Because for incels, they kind of look at it in a very black-and-white, uh, way, and perhaps a lot of men generally do this too, that they think something is better than nothing. For men, sex is like pizza. There's good pizza, and there's pizza. There's no bad pizza, really. Uh, but for women, that's not the case. And I think we're underestimating just how much women don't like having sex with men they don't like having sex with. It's, like, repellent to them. They have high disgust sensitivity, uh, or low, uh, they're, they're, they're like, um, it's, it's really repugnant, that idea to, to have, to have sex with someone you don't want, and it's actually cost-inflicting. So, something is not better than r- uh, than nothing always for a woman. And, uh, that's kind of a, a failure of cross-sex mind reading, I think, on the behalf of incels.

   5. CWChris Williamson11:38

      Louise Perry, in her book, she talks about this prostitute that was working for her.

   6. WCWilliam Costello11:43

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson11:43

      And I think it was a prostitute rather than an escort. I don't know what the difference is. Escort's just, like, nicer.

   8. WCWilliam Costello11:47

      (clears throat) Mm-hmm.

   9. CWChris Williamson11:47

      Um, but, and she said that one of the first skills that you need to develop as a prostitute is to not throw up when you're having sex with a client, because of-

   10. WCWilliam Costello11:56

       Mm-hmm.

   11. CWChris Williamson11:57

       ... you, you are having to give yourself an out-of-body experience to detach the emotions from what's going on to you physically.

   12. WCWilliam Costello12:03

       Yeah. Uh, that, that actually, I listened to that, and, uh, I, I, that gave me an idea for a study, because there's another evolutionary psychologist called Hannah Bradshaw, and at a recent conference, she presented something on disgust that showed that when you have control over your environment, then your, your disgust is quite high, sensitive. Uh, whereas if you don't have control over your environment, you down-regulate your disgust. So, take for example, the pig farmer. W- we're a family of pig farmers in my house. And if you're working on a pig farm, you don't really have much choice to leave, so you kind of get used to the smell.... whereas if you visit a pig farm for the first time, you might be like, "Oh, God. Get me out of here." And the fact that you can get out would maybe make you think, "Oh, okay, I got to leave. This disgust is high." So, I think as... an idea for a study might be, uh, to examine whether sex workers who have more control over the clientele that they see, do they have a higher level of, uh, sensitivity of disgust, 'cause-

   13. CWChris Williamson12:59

       Ah.

   14. WCWilliam Costello13:00

       ... they can control it, so they don't have to. Um, whereas those who are really, like, uh, you know, a, a prostitute or a sex worker who maybe doesn't have really that much control, they probably down-regulate their disgust mechanism, kind of like Lou- Louise, um, talks about there.

   15. CWChris Williamson13:14

       Dude, that's fascinating. The pig-

   16. WCWilliam Costello13:16

       Mm-hmm.

   17. CWChris Williamson13:16

       The pig farmer theory of female sexual disgust.

   18. WCWilliam Costello13:19

       My father would be absolutely delighted if I-

   19. CWChris Williamson13:21

       (laughs)

   20. WCWilliam Costello13:22

       ... wove pig farming into my theories about-

   21. CWChris Williamson13:25

       (laughs)

   22. WCWilliam Costello13:25

       I can see him now.

   23. CWChris Williamson13:26

       I knew that all of those, those hours on the pig farm was going to work out when it, when it came to your PhD. All right, so just finishing off that discussion about the lady, the b- boss bitch, like, do you see it as women's fault for having too high standards at the moment?

   24. WCWilliam Costello13:43

       Um, I kind of... (sighs) I can't really bla-... I don't think that's, um, a realistic kind of goal to say, "Oh, women, just lower your standards." Um, you know, if I was a woman or my female friends, I don't expect them to lower their standards. I want them to find love and, uh, something that will add to their life. But there, there's a really good book, um, by Eli Finkel called The All or Nothing Marriage, and it talks about how we put more and more... we make marriage more, um, it has to be everything. Your, your spouse has to be, um, your best friend, your sexual, uh, paramour, inspire you, uh, contribute to everything, e- everything all in one. Whereas in the past, uh, you might say, "Okay, my spouse is a great, um, mother, but my intellectual interests are met for, by other friends or something like that." That's no longer the case. We're putting more and more pressure on, uh, what our spouse needs to do. So, uh, you know, and that, that, that's actually... it means that higher socioeconomic, uh, marriages actually do better and it's the l- lower economic, uh, ones that suffer, which is, uh, a kind of a, a sad finding. Um, so yeah, I don't really expect women to lower their standards and I don't think that's realistic. What I think might be maybe realistic is that mate preferences, although they're evolved, they're very sensitive to status. Uh, so you can assign status to almost anything. Y- you had Will Storr on and he talked about the yams, the farmers who assign statuses to whoever can grow the biggest yam, right? So, you can assign status to almost anything. So, maybe we could shift towards a world where stay-at-home dads are more valued i- in the mating market, but, uh, it seems to be a slow kind of shift towards that because there was one study that showed that just 5% of women desired, um, a relationship where they worked full-time, uh, and their partner worked part-time or not at all. So, you know, I always make the analogy, a woman can leave... or a girl could leave school and decide, "I'm going to be, uh, either a full-time worker, part-time worker, or stay-at-home mom." Whereas a man doesn't really have that. He has obligation for success, uh, only one route really if, if he wants to attract a mate. Uh, so that's... I'm optimistic on one level, pessimistic on another. Um, but yeah, I think rather than that, you know, what advice would I give a female friend? Would I tell her to settle or would I say, "No, I mean, you're, you're doing pretty good, uh, uh, on your own" and it seems to be veering towards, like, that Huxleyan kind of society of singlehood as the default.

4. 16:18 – 28:43

   Is Hypergamy in Decline?

   1. WCWilliam Costello16:19

   2. CWChris Williamson16:19

      Is hypergamy on the decline?

   3. WCWilliam Costello16:21

      So, there is some evidence, uh, for this, um, which I think is kind of inevitable. So, hypergamy is women's tendencies to mate, uh, with an equal or higher status kind of mate. And, uh, I think it's inevitable as more and more women become highly educated and, uh, killing it in the workplace that they will begin to have to mate down. And, uh, some, some evolutionary kind of based scholars disagree with me on the fact that there is a mating crisis at all and they point to some of this evidence as evidence that there is no mating crisis, nothing to worry about. But even the authors of that study that showed that hypergamy is in decline said that they can't speak to the perceived difficulty for women in finding mates that they have to mate down with. Uh, so it doesn't appear that women are actually that happy.

   4. CWChris Williamson17:05

      What, what does that mean?

   5. WCWilliam Costello17:07

      So, the... it doesn't appear that women are actually that happy about having to mate down. So, there's some evidence for this that, uh, female infidelity is kind of on the rise in lockstep with hypergamy. So, as hypergamy is in decline, female infidelity, not male, uh, goes up. Male infidelities remain pretty stable over the last 50 or so years, but female infidelity has increased by 40% over the last half century. And, uh, perhaps that, uh, just an artifact of them occupying more high-status positions, being around more high-status men, maybe increased anonymity with dating apps and things like that, um-

   6. CWChris Williamson17:46

      Lower partner satisfaction as well, probably.

   7. WCWilliam Costello17:49

      Yeah, no longer reliant, uh, on, uh... you know, the... no longer having to worry about what would happen if they did get divorced. Uh, another, uh, troubling finding from this, um, consequence of the decline in hypergamy is that a recent study of 21,000 women in 27 EU countries found that women who were higher educated or earning more than their partners were more likely to report all types of intimate partner violence. And that makes sense from an evolutionary point of view because men are most likely to kind of inflict costs on their partner when they feel like they might be about to lose them. So, if their partner is earning more than them and is around more high-status men, they're getting that cue and, and they'll, they'll maybe shift to... because when you don't have much benefit to provide, you change to a cost-inflicting, uh, mate retention strategy. So, that might be what's happening there. So, it's not like, oh, hypergamy is in decline,That's nothing to worry about. You know, there's downstream consequences of this and, uh, y- you know, the mating crisis overall has, uh, broader conf- uh, consequences too because, uh, you might have heard of something called young male syndrome, Chris? Uh, have you heard of that?

   8. CWChris Williamson18:59

      That's the proliferation of childless partner-less men roaming the streets in gangs and graffitiing everywhere and kicking grannies and stuff.

   9. WCWilliam Costello19:09

      Right. So, if you have a surplus population of unpartnered young men in any society, cross-culturally, cross-historically, they've always been extremely destructive and, you know, due to elevated risk-taking and status-striving kind of behaviors. Um, so, you know, that, that... This kind of mating crisis is dangerous on a bigger level because that's, uh, what we're leaning towards. And actually, you know, we would act- although there is a level of threat from incel violence, uh, I feel like it's over, uh, over-emphasized in the media and a bit alarmist. Uh, but theoretically, we should expect that incels represent a very dangerous portion of society. But what might be happening there is that their status-striving mechanisms are maybe hijacked just by online worlds, and they're status-striving in forums or shit-posting on the internet and getting kind of counterfeit fitness cues from pornography that you're an evolutionary success if you stay at home jerking off to, uh, the stimula- the stimulus of, uh, the sex on the screen. That's a, an idea put forward in a great article by Diana Fleischman called Uncanny Vulvas.

   10. CWChris Williamson20:12

       (laughs)

   11. WCWilliam Costello20:13

       Uh, a, a play on, uh, on c- the uncanny valley. Uh, it, it's a really good read.

   12. CWChris Williamson20:17

       Yeah, so what you're saying is that the young male syndrome, which is this, uh, phenomenon where lots of men without partners tends to be destabilizing for society, could perhaps be being dampened down by online status, by porn, all of these things that are kind of simulacrums of cues that they would have previously been super aggressive about, but they're kind of being sedated into, uh, a more, uh-

   13. WCWilliam Costello20:43

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson20:43

       ... domi- domiciled version of this, right?

   15. WCWilliam Costello20:45

       Yeah, it's like a pacifier.

   16. CWChris Williamson20:47

       Yes.

   17. WCWilliam Costello20:47

       A pacifying effect that, uh... But yeah, yeah, you mentioned there, uh, that you, uh, you had Joe Henrich on the podcast before, right?

   18. CWChris Williamson20:54

       Indeed.

   19. WCWilliam Costello20:54

       Yeah, so he, he wrote a great paper called The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage, and he talks about how, uh, cultures that began to practice monogamy flourished more than those that stuck with polygyny, which 83% of human societies that there ever has been or have ever been studied have been preferentially polygynous. And, uh, Joe Henrich talks about it as in monogamy's main cultural advantage is the egalitarian distribution of women and that, that's... A lot of listeners might get, uh, get mad at me talking about women as a, a resource, but they're a reproductive resource and a-

   20. CWChris Williamson21:27

       Sexual reprod- it's sexual distribution strategy, man.

   21. WCWilliam Costello21:29

       Right.

   22. CWChris Williamson21:30

       Like, if, if man number one gets woman number one to number 10, and then man number two takes woman number 11 to 20, after a while you can see how you capture a lot of the market, whether this is one to one-

   23. WCWilliam Costello21:41

       Mm-hmm.

   24. CWChris Williamson21:41

       ... two to two, three to three, four to four, all the way along.

   25. WCWilliam Costello21:44

       Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson21:44

       It keeps more people more happy.

   27. WCWilliam Costello21:46

       Yep.

   28. CWChris Williamson21:46

       And, uh, yeah, going back to what you said before about how, um, cultural preferences mediate sexual desire or mediate mating preferences, right? Like, what's held up in the culture as something, and you can see Disney movies almost as reinforcing this back in the day. You know, you find the true love, you go through challenges, there are things that try to tempt you away and so on and so forth. To see it as, to simply call Disney movies a patriarchal, presupposition, cis-heteronormatively telling women about how they're supposed to stay under the boot of men, you go... A lot of what was happening with constraining sexual desire previously and having one man to one woman wasn't just constraining female sexual desire, it was constraining male sexual desire as well.

   29. WCWilliam Costello22:32

       Absolutely.

   30. CWChris Williamson22:32

       It was making sure that men reached the threshold that they needed to in order to be worthy of having a woman. If a woman gives away sex too freely, men will meet that criteria, and if the criteria and the bar is set unbelievably low, men will do what's asked of them, which is not very much.
5. 28:43 – 35:25

   Leonardo DiCaprio’s Girlfriends

   1. CWChris Williamson28:43

      you shared yesterday on Twitter a graph of Leonardo DiCaprio's age and his girlfriends' ages. It went viral on the Date Her Beautiful subreddit. Can you explain what that graph shows, please?

   2. WCWilliam Costello28:57

      Yeah. So hopefully you'll be able to put it on the screen, but it basically shows like as Leonardo's age goes up linearly, uh, the age of his mates stays roughly the same at about 25. It was down at around 18, 19 when he's a little bit younger, but it seems to be at 25 that it's his cutoff point. For the last maybe nine or 10 girlfriends, it's been a consistent pattern.

   3. CWChris Williamson29:21

      They reach 25 and then he replaces them with another one.

   4. WCWilliam Costello29:24

      Yeah. And it's wi- it's, it sparked some wild discourse, you know, uh, online and it's revealed a lot of, kind of, intersexual competition and stuff like that. So, you have some women talking about it always saying, "Oh, he's such a creep, you know. He's old enough to be their father." Which I think is interesting whenever, um, women or people criticize a big age gap relationship, what they do is they leverage our incest disgust by saying things like, "He's old enough to be, uh, her father." And, you know, it's not related, there's no genetic link at all. It's not disgusting on that level. But they'll, they'll leverage that, our, our intuitive feeling of incest disgust. Um, but, uh, and, uh, another comment I saw on this, um, Leo age gap thing is, "Oh, it's such a sign that he's immature and not able to attract women his own age, and any guy who does that is such a creep." And that's just so purely intersexual competition. Uh, like, of course women over the age of 30 would still be interested in Leonardo DiCaprio. Like, that is, uh, no mystery. It's not exactly horrible for these women to be dating handsome mega millionaire movie star, Leonardo DiCaprio. It's, it's not hell, right? Um, another interesting take I saw on it which was a, a weird twist, um, i- is someone said, "I think it's actually kind of nice that he knows he can't go beyond 25 with a woman and he's alwa- but at least he's not taking away her fertile years. She still has a chance to recover it."

   5. CWChris Williamson30:50

      (laughs)

   6. WCWilliam Costello30:50

      It would be worse if, if he pushed it all the way to 30 and then just cut and left. Which you can kind of say I don't know how intentional that is. That might be a charitable interpretation of Leo's behavior.

   7. CWChris Williamson31:01

      Yes, I think so.

   8. WCWilliam Costello31:01

      But, um, but yeah. But, uh, it's, uh, like I, I put it up, uh, put up the graph and said, "Oh, if only we had the grand meta-theory of human psychology and human nature to explain Leonardo DiCaprio's preference for beautiful, fertile young women." You know? It's, uh, yeah. People, people getting very, very excited about this graph.

   9. CWChris Williamson31:22

      The interesting thing is, uh, I didn't see any of the girls talk about this online, but it has to be a signal in the same way as one of the best ways to be attractive as a man is to walk into the club with a couple of girls on your arm that are both attractive and seem to give you attention. It has to be the case that somewhere deep in the programming of some women, they look at the fact that Leo is able to date a woman that's half his age and think, "He's getting something right there."

   10. WCWilliam Costello31:48

       Mm.

   11. CWChris Williamson31:48

       Now, this is not the sort of thing that would be very popular to post about online. The fact that you use the mate value of a man as a proxy for the man's mate value himself, especially as he gets older, which is something that is, like, completely, um, r- irreversible, right? There's no- there's nothing-

   12. WCWilliam Costello32:08

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson32:08

       ... you can do about that. You can't, you can't lift your way out of being 53.

   14. WCWilliam Costello32:11

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson32:12

       Uh-

   16. WCWilliam Costello32:12

       Absolutely. And, like, they've done a lot of studies that show that mate value, or your sense of your own mate value, is a direct proxy for self-esteem, particularly for men. So, uh, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised at that. And, and a lot of women in their mate preferences, uh, engage in mate copying, so mate, uh, mate choice copying. So, if one woman kind of... It's like fashion almost. If one woman endorses a guy, he suddenly becomes, "Oh, well, he must be, uh, he must be all right. Someone vetted him." Y- you know the example I, I use there is, what's his name? Phil Davison or Pete Davison?

   17. CWChris Williamson32:43

       Yes.

   18. WCWilliam Costello32:43

       He's suddenly able to pull every smoking hot woman in Hollywood, like, all of a sudden, and it snowballs. And you might even notice, uh, Chris, in your own life, that sometimes when you have a girlfriend, you seem to get a bit more attention. And I don't know... From other women. And I don't know whether it's because you're more relaxed and your guard is a bit more down, but some of it might be, "Oh, yeah, someone has considered him high value enough." But, uh, so the commentator who put up about Leo, she actually made the opposite argument, and she said, "Oh, I find it so hot when a man is dating an older woman who is, um, like, very sophisticated, because it signals he's obviously smart. Whereas if he goes for the fertile young woman, it signals that he's, he's not able to keep up with the, uh, intellectual life-"

   19. CWChris Williamson33:29

       Yeah.

   20. WCWilliam Costello33:29

       "... of the fertile young women."

   21. CWChris Williamson33:30

       I've, I've got the tweet. I've got the tweet here. "The whole DiCaprio thing reminds me one reason a guy might constantly choose much younger partners is because women his own age have higher standards. From an adult woman's point of view, when we see a man with a woman more or less his age or older, we know that guy is most likely great. Macron is probably the most extreme we know of. Every time I look at that guy, I'm thinking, oh my God, he must be fucking smart if that woman who could have picked from a 40-year age range thinks that he's the partner." That could not be more backward.

   22. WCWilliam Costello34:01

       Mm.

   23. CWChris Williamson34:01

       That literally could not be more backward. How are you going to try and tell me that s- that a woman that's 53 is higher, is going to have higher standards than a woman that is slap-bang in the middle of her fertile years?

   24. WCWilliam Costello34:15

       Yeah. Yeah. It, it, uh, that was a little bit wrong. And I, I did retweet it to try and maybe spark a bit of debate. And, uh, the, the woman who, who wrote the tweet, Anna Gat, I actually really admire her, most of her, her Twitter, uh, content, and she runs a really cool, uh, c- organization called the Interintellect, which puts on kind of intellectual gather- salon-type gatherings. Uh, so I don't mean to, to, like, dunk, uh, on her take. And it is interesting on one level, and maybe there is some truth to it. But yeah, it's missing that piece of, uh, you know, I, I feel like maybe saying to her, "Your intersexual competition is showing." (laughs)

   25. CWChris Williamson34:46

       (laughs)

   26. WCWilliam Costello34:47

       But, uh, but, you know, intersexual competition-

   27. CWChris Williamson34:49

       Yeah.

   28. WCWilliam Costello34:49

       ... particularly for women, is very hidden even to themselves.

   29. CWChris Williamson34:53

       Yes.

   30. WCWilliam Costello34:53

       So, the... You can't let it show. You can't really... It has to be all, uh, subtle, um, whi- which is interesting. So, she, she might not even actually perceive it as such.
6. 35:25 – 43:14

   The Power to Charm a Female

   1. CWChris Williamson35:25

      mind. So, at the start-

   2. WCWilliam Costello35:26

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson35:26

      At, at the start of your paper that you did about incels, you have this quote from Charles Darwin who says, "The power to charm the female has sometimes been more important than the power to conquer other males in battle." Why was that there at the beginning?

   4. WCWilliam Costello35:40

      I just wanted to kind of, uh, highlight how important and fundamental the recurring problem of finding and retaining a mate has been evolutionarily. Like, we're an unbroken chain of ancestors who did just that. So, that's incredible. You know, uh, the, when, whenever I feel small in the world, I kind of think of that. Um, so it's, it's a big problem. It's the number one kind of problem on people's minds. I wanted to put that front and center. And whenever you have any evolutionary problem or something like that, or any new problem, Darwin probably had a really insightful quote on it, or William James. Uh, they actually had such an intuitive, uh, sense of human psychology, which is, uh, it's so interesting. So yeah, I wanted to kind of start it as, uh, uh, this, uh, to... I wanted to approach the paper from an evolutionary point of view. Uh, so that was a good start. And, uh, you know, th- those methods of attracting a mate, uh, you know, by beating a man in combat, are really not available to you now. Like, those tactics that might have made you an evolutionary success in attracting a mate for most of our ancestral history would now probably land you in jail most of the time. Uh, so, you know, we're living in a very evolutionary mismatched kind of world, um, i- in, in terms of our ma- uh, our, the mating domain. Uh, actually, my... There's a, an author, Carrie Getz, uh, and she wrote a paper with some, some other-... uh, scholars, including my supervisor, David Buss, about, uh, evolutionary mismatch in mating. So, evolutionary mismatch is the idea that the world around us differs radically from the world in response to which our, uh, psychological mechanisms evolved. And, uh, they coined the, the acronym STRANGELY WEIRD. So, you might have heard of the, um, the acronym WEIRD in psychology, which describes-

   5. CWChris Williamson37:21

      Western, educated, da, da, da, da, da.

   6. WCWilliam Costello37:23

      Industrialized, rich, and democratic. So, like, over 90% of psychology studies are based on WEIRD societies, and, uh, they house just, like, 12% of the world's population. So, they built on that, so not only is our mating environment weird, but it's also strangely weird. So, we have access to social media and dating apps, temporary relationships, relocatable. We're relocatable, we can move around geographically. We have way more autonomy for the, uh, in mate choice. Uh, whereas, you know, in the past, you wouldn't have had that much choice anyway, and your parents probably would have decided it for you. Uh, we have the ability to remain nulliparous, which means, like, not having children by decision. That's very evolutionary novel. Um, we're segmented by groups, uh, often find ourselves in educational settings with concentrated, uh, huge amounts of young people. We have lots of options, and we're making decisions as kind of young adults. So, a young adult, uh, would have been a seasoned parent by, like, 25. So, the fact that they're, you're, you're kind of this, uh, delayed adolescence almost being a young adult i- is pretty evolutionary novel too.

   7. CWChris Williamson38:34

      It's interesting to think... Uh, I imagine that, uh, some of the incels that you've studied-

   8. WCWilliam Costello38:39

      (clears throat)

   9. CWChris Williamson38:39

      ... must get pushback from normal people when they say, "Well, look, finding a partner isn't the be all and end all of life. It's not like you can't go through life without... The lady, the, with five houses in New York, you know? She's going through life, and she's perfectly happy. Why is it that you need..." And I think that that Darwin quote, to me, just reminds us, especially for men, the fear, the ambient anxiety of not being a genetic success-

   10. WCWilliam Costello39:06

       Mm-hmm.

   11. CWChris Williamson39:06

       ... hangs heavy.

   12. WCWilliam Costello39:08

       Yeah, and actually it's like a- an- an under-maybe-explored part of inceldom that it's also, it's not just involuntary celibate and the sex, it's involuntarily childless. Like, uh, becoming a father is one of the most meaningful things in many men's lives, and that's not on the cards for incels as far as they're concerned. That must be very, very psychologically distressing. And yeah, when people say that to me, of, "Oh, it's not the be all and end all," it reminds me of that meme (laughs) where it says, "Life is so simple. Have problem, don't care about problem."

   13. CWChris Williamson39:41

       (laughs)

   14. WCWilliam Costello39:41

       "Problem solved." (laughs) It's like, why not simply just don't care about your problems? Like, (laughs) what advice is that, you know? It's like, yeah, of course, that would be easy, if only I could just not care. You know?

   15. CWChris Williamson39:51

       Did you look at anything like, um, opinions around adoption or pets in the incel world?

   16. WCWilliam Costello40:00

       Hm, I didn't. What- what- what ideas do you have on that, like, that they would maybe-

   17. CWChris Williamson40:03

       One of the problems that you have with men is that they're childless. You can have a child. I'm aware that it's not precisely your genetic lineage, but people that are adoptee parents seem pretty happy to me.

   18. WCWilliam Costello40:13

       You know what? I did actually include a question on that of whether you'd like to become a parent, and I- I even included options of, uh, whether you'd like to, uh, but only if you had a partner or, "Yes, I would like to on my own." But I didn't actually include it in any of the two papers we're writing. But I might actually look back on that, and, uh, I'll send it your way, uh, to let you know what the, what the attitudes were there. I asked a lot of questions that I didn't actually even get to report on, uh, 'cause I figured if I've got a lot of incels engaging with the study, I'm gonna ask them a lot of things and-

   19. CWChris Williamson40:43

       Yeah.

   20. WCWilliam Costello40:44

       ... get a lot of mileage out of this study (laughs) .

   21. CWChris Williamson40:45

       Yeah, I- I just wonder, I think a big part of it... I had Norma Yates on the show. I've spoken to James Bloodworth. A lot of the conversations I've had around the crisis of sort of male dating at the moment touches on this. And a part of it is that, it seems it's the desire for men to feel like they're wanted. They want to be wanted, you know? And that makes them... It- it- it weaves them into the tapestry of society overall. And the less that they're wanted, the more that they pull themselves away. And there's certain things. I walk, there's this dog park next to my house, and I walk every single morning, and all of the people that have got dogs have got friends because the dogs make friends. And I just wondered whether, I don't know, pet ownership and/or adoption is something that incels have potentially considered as a way to re-weave themselves back in.

   22. WCWilliam Costello41:31

       It's a- it's a good point because, yeah, also having a dog is very attractive to women (laughs) , so maybe, like, when he-

   23. CWChris Williamson41:37

       Did you see th- the study that came out about six months ago that was looking at a man holding a cat in his Tinder photos gets about 30% less swipes than a guy that's got a dog, who gets, v- versus the norm, uh, ver- versus the control, sorry, gets, like, 20% more?

   24. WCWilliam Costello41:53

       Yeah, I'm not, I'm not surprised with that. Um, and- but- and- and another study at a conference I attended lately, I can't recall who did it, um, but they showed that, uh, having a dog indicates, uh, long-term mating qualities. So, women associated a man having a dog with, oh, he's reliable, he's capable, he's calmed down. He's obviously not out partying all the time 'cause he's looking after the dog. You know? So, it might be a good tactic. You know? Like, uh, it's kind of tongue-in-cheek, oh, get a dog. Incels will probably get, tear their hair out hearing me saying that, saying, "Oh God, how can you minimize the problems like that?" But on a- on a- on a broader level of if, uh, having a girlfriend isn't on the cards, yeah, the- the kind of companionship of a pet is... I- I- I love my dog. He's, like, my best friend. But, um, uh, yeah, I think that... And there was another study by a scholar called Brandon Sparks, and he's studying incels as well. And he found that incels, they lack o- friends generally, not just, uh, romantic options. They just ha- and they have that, lacking friends is a kind of a, it means you don't have that buffer against the negative feelings of not having a romantic partner. You often find that, uh, these single people who are very happy to be single...... what they have is very rich friendships, and, uh, i- if incels are lacking that as well, it might be just a broader loneliness thing, which, uh, w- we found that they had, uh, extremely high levels of loneliness compared to non-incels in, in our study.

7. 43:14 – 59:20

   Common Traits of Incels

   1. WCWilliam Costello43:14

   2. CWChris Williamson43:14

      What do most incels have in common, then? What about traits and personality types and whatever? What's the prototypical incel?

   3. WCWilliam Costello43:22

      Okay. So what we found, in terms of, uh, personality, they're ve- uh, uh, w- uh, I didn't do this study, but they're very neurotic, uh, kind of high on negative experiences. One thing we found in our study, uh, we tested them for a new scale, uh, which is called the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, and that's, uh, a new scale developed that's comprised of four different dimensions. Uh, one is the need for recognition, so very preoccupied with having the legitimacy of their grievances acknowledged. So the worst thing you can say to an incel to make them dr- tear their hair out is, "You don't have it that bad. You're, you're not so bad," you know? You have to actually recognize that they are suffering. And actually, I think that's why they have a, a bit of rapport with me, um, they seem to appreciate that I don't sugarcoat it or gaslight them, uh, uh, as they say. So they seem to appreciate... I wrote a blog a couple of years back called Step Your Dick Up: Why, uh, Advice Given to Incels, Um, It Won't Work, and it kind of just laid it out how insufficient the advice i- is, uh, is for incels. So, one dimension of that personality trait, that victimhood trait, is need for recognition. The next is moral elitism, so the belief that the individual or their in-group behaves more morally than others. And you might see this with incels kind of, uh, sneering at, uh, the, the superficiality of the mating market, uh, for both Chads and Staceys. They think, "Oh, they're all... The... I'd have much more high-ended kind of values and they should be rewarding intellect and personality that I have, uh, rather than just, m- Giga Chad and his gorgeous looks," right? The third dimension is lack of empathy, so that plays out, um, "Well, no one cares about my problems, so why should I care, uh, about anyone else's?" And then finally, the final dimension is rumination, uh, which is a constant preoccupation with reliving their perceived, uh, negative experiences, so constantly ruminating, uh, on their, uh, bad experiences. And this victimhood mindset leads to an external locus of control, so incels with their black pill kind of philosophy believe that there is nothing they can do to effect change in their life. So they're just completely not agentic at all, um, so, uh, th- that, uh, you know, maybe cultivating an internal locus of control to some degree might be a pathway, uh, out of, uh, out of that for incels. Uh, so we also found extremely low, uh, levels of well-being. So incels scored extremely high on depression, anxiety, loneliness, and really low on satisfaction with life. So n- perhaps not that surprising, but to put that into context for you, uh, we used th- two scales, the PHQ-9 to measure depression, so that's the scale used by the NHS, uh, i- in the UK. And anxiety, we used the GAD-7 to, to measure anxiety. So in terms of depression, uh, roughly 73% of incels were diagnosed as severely or moderately severely depressed versus 33% of non-incels, which 33% seems pretty high to me anyway ab- in, in the general population, but 73% is, uh, you know... Th- that's very, very high. In terms of anxiety, we had 67% of incels clinically diagnosable as severely or moderately anxious versus 38%, uh, of non-incels. Um, incels also scored very high on sociosexual desire, so that's the desire dimension of sociosexuality, so they're very... They have a high level of sexual desire. And I thought... One of the hypotheses I had in my, um, in my dissertation that it was the only one that wasn't supported, I thought that for those incels who have a high level of sociosexual desire, that that would actually lead to worse levels of well-being for those because they might be... I- if you have high levels of, uh, desire, but you're perceiving that you have no way to act on that desire, uh, then it's, um... That, that to me would result in l- lower levels of well-being. If you didn't have a high level of desire, then it's not that big of a problem anyway. It's like, "Oh, well, I can't get the sex I don't really want anyway, so not too bad." But uh, actually, it just... It, it, it w- it didn't moderate things, uh, in any way, but that might be just because incels have just low levels of well-being kind of across the board, whether they have high levels of desire or not.

   4. CWChris Williamson47:39

      Uh, they... Their current s- uh, mental state is so robustly negative that there's very little that can push that down any further. Well, so o- one of the, one of the interesting things to come out of that is it seems like incels have to have a preoccupation with sociosexuality, with wanting a mate, with thinking about a mate, because if it wasn't, it, it simply wouldn't be such a central part of their life. If they were completely obsessed with Warhammer or with pickleball or whatever, art or something, and something-

   5. WCWilliam Costello48:10

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson48:10

      ... big happened in the art world and they were spurned from all of their art friends-

   7. WCWilliam Costello48:13

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson48:14

      ... that would be the incel equivalent of being kicked out of a thing that you care about. It seems like most of the incels, the thing that they care about, which is one of the most core parts of their being, perhaps the most core part of their being, is that sociosexuality.

   9. WCWilliam Costello48:27

      Absolutely. And you can even, like, see it in the kind of language they use. It's almost sometimes homoerotic about Chad, you know, and Stacy and, like, they draw cartoons with Chad's big dick and it... It's very, like, uh, erotic. Like, they're, they're very charged and, uh, kind of, uh, viscerally sexual in their discourse, you know? So yeah, that's why I kind of thought... And also, can you blame incels? I mean, we live in a world that's very saturated with sex. Like, you see it on billboards and movies and, like, you get the impression that everyone is out there having amazing sex lives. We live in a hookup culture. It's actually not true. You know, people aren't having that much sex. You know, people are very much more-

   10. CWChris Williamson49:05

       Having less sex than ever before.

   11. WCWilliam Costello49:07

       Right. And, you know, people overestimate how much sex other people are having. So, uh, you know, maybe that would be helpful for incels to realize, you know, it's not, uh, it's not as sex-saturated as, uh, it might seem.

   12. CWChris Williamson49:19

       What about alt-right and being alt-right? There's accusations whenever an incel's in the press of, "This yet another right-wing misogynist gone wild." What did you find out-

   13. WCWilliam Costello49:29

       Right.

   14. CWChris Williamson49:29

       ... about that?

   15. WCWilliam Costello49:30

       Yeah, so I decided to measure that. It was just one item question, uh, on, uh, uh, political affiliation so I always... In the paper, I recommend that we should investigate that a little bit more. But, uh, uh, perhaps a surprising finding, uh, if you were to go by the mainstream media kind of discourse, we found that a smaller proportion than would be expected by chance were white for a majority US and UK, uh, sample. So, we had 63%, uh, 63.5% were white and 36.5% were, um, incels of color, and I, I kind of clumped all the in- uh, ethnicities into one.

   16. CWChris Williamson50:04

       (laughs) How do the incels feel about having an incels of color movement inside of it?

   17. WCWilliam Costello50:09

       Well, actually, you know what? I think it might be a way to cultivate maybe a bit more sympathy because in the kind of Oppression Olympics world... I, I listened to one academic on another podcast and when she was talking about the incel problem, initially the podcast host was a bit kind of sneering and he kind of thought, "Oh, this is just a right-wing, white male problem." But when she told him, "Oh, actually there's a lot of incels of color," he completely changed tact and he was completely sympathetic and it was suddenly, "Oh, actually, you know, there might be something... Uh, we should have sympathy here." So, uh, we investigated the political leanings as well and we found that 39% reported to be right-leaning, 45% reported to be left-leaning, and roughly 17% reported to be centrist. So, not what you would expect to find. A counterintuitive finding in our data, um, but, uh, perhaps not that surprising if you think about a lot of incel discourse is about kind of egalitarian, more redistribution of sexual access and equality, and, uh, they're very concerned with the racism of the mating market. So, it would be very surprising for me to find, uh, you know, a, a large white supremacist or right-wing, uh, presence. But, you know, there is a lot of racialized derogatory slang in the incels' sphere. Some of their language is very, you know, unsavory, but they... All their language is unsavory. That's their thing, like, they just-

   18. CWChris Williamson51:33

       That's, that's when you put a lot of men in any situation together for a long time.

   19. WCWilliam Costello51:37

       And especially if you drive that conversation completely underground and say, "You're your own underground society, you're not attached to real society," so they're gonna play by their own norms.

   20. CWChris Williamson51:47

       I'll dispense with the- Precisely, I'll dispense-

   21. WCWilliam Costello51:49

       Exactly.

   22. CWChris Williamson51:49

       ... with the norms of society. I don't need to-

   23. WCWilliam Costello51:50

       Yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson51:50

       ... play by your rules.

   25. WCWilliam Costello51:52

       So, uh, and it might be a way of lashing out at society of, "Oh, well, at least here you can't control us. We can't, we don't have to play by your rules in, in our world."

   26. CWChris Williamson52:00

       Yeah, per- performative ruthlessness with the language.

   27. WCWilliam Costello52:05

       Absolutely. So, another study found, uh, it analyzed incel forum posts and it found that just 3% of incel posts could be considered racist. Uh, meanwhile 30% of incel threads could be considered misogynistic, the same study found. But again, that to me seems a little bit low. You would think from the discourse about incels that it would be higher, like 30%.

   28. CWChris Williamson52:24

       Everything would be. It'd be, like, 100%.

   29. WCWilliam Costello52:27

       Right, yeah. So, and she, uh, the, the author found that self-hatred is by far the most common form of toxic language in the incels' sphere. Uh, so, yeah, that was, uh, our findings on the ethnicity and, uh-

   30. CWChris Williamson52:40

       So-
8. 59:20 – 1:08:27

   How Incels Become ‘Fakecels’

   1. CWChris Williamson59:20

      what's that? What's the issue within the incel community of fakecells, of ascending, and of giving hope?

   2. WCWilliam Costello59:28

      So, yeah. So, they... I, I think it's, like, basically, it's a slap in the face to their worldview to see somebody ascend. And, you know, there's not a wha- a wholesale agreement on this. I'd say a lot of incels are kind of limiting to others and want to keep them dragged down, alone together. That's the kind of the, the attitude. Whereas other incels might actually be, uh, encouraging and want to see other incels, uh, succeed. Certainly in the qualitative interviews I've done one-to-one with incels, I, I, I've met some of those guys who actually want to see others succeed and who haven't given up. Um, but yeah, it's a very limiting... Because at first when I started to study incels, I thought, "How could anyone kind of come to identify with this aspect? Surely if you felt that way about yourself, you'd want to keep that hidden. You wouldn't hunker down into that identity." But as I began to study it more, they actually get a lot out of their incel identity. Compared to the anxiety-inducing mating market, they get an, a, a sense of belonging, fraternity, a virtuous victimhood identity, which is very, very en vogue these days. So, they're like, "Oh, I'll have a piece of that victimhood pie, please." Um, y- yeah, there, there's one study that shows that incels report their reasons for using forums are to feel understood, feel less lonely, and get a sense of belonging. Um, but in that study, a little over half of the participants reported that the forum made them feel hopeless. So, it's very, very much a mixed bag. And in my study, I decided to break it down. I managed to recruit 151 incels, and a lot of them were non-forum using, which I think is, uh, really good data because it, it, it shows you that the, the incel phenomenon is a little bit more than just an online subculture. But one of the useful things there was I was able to r- compare forum using versus non-forum using incels. And forum use slightly predicted greater anxiety. 37%, uh, of, uh, i- incels who used the forum said that it made their wellbeing much or somewhat better, while 39% were not sure and 24% thought that it worsened their wellbeing. So, it's very much a mixed bag that for some, the forums might be great. "It's finally, I've found some c- uh, comradery." And for others, it might be really, really, uh, limiting and worsening their, their mental health.... only 20% of incels in my study, uh, indicated that they do not believe they will be involuntarily celibate for the rest of their life. And this belief in permanency of inceldom was a significant predictor of depression and low life satisfaction. So, i- it does seem in our data on the actual mental health outcomes, that believing in the black pill seems to be a big predictor, uh, o- of depression and low life satisfaction. But that, that's quite high that 80% of the incels in my study think they will be incel for life, it's not, it's not gonna change.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:02:20

      That's one of the predictors for people that take their own lives as well, right? That this is bad, it's not going to get better, and this is the way that it's always going to be.

   4. WCWilliam Costello1:02:28

      Yes.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:02:28

      Yeah.

   6. WCWilliam Costello1:02:28

      And that ties in with the no, uh, the, the no internal locus of control, it's like, "I can't change, nothing will change it. My life is completely at the forces of everything outside of me." And, you know, suicidality, uh, is quite high among incels too. 82% of incels indicated that they had strongly considered committing suicide. And there's one really-

   7. CWChris Williamson1:02:48

      How many... Hang on, hang on, hang on. 82%?

   8. WCWilliam Costello1:02:51

      82%. Um-

   9. CWChris Williamson1:02:52

      Dude, that's the most shocking statistic that I've heard so far.

   10. WCWilliam Costello1:02:55

       Yeah. That's wild. Now, that is from an in-house, uh, survey. But there's another, uh, really good qualitative kind of, uh, or a, uh, linguistic analysis, uh, study, uh, by Dr. Sarah Daly. Let me get the name of it. It's, uh, oh, it's, uh, Goodbye, My Friend Cells, and it analyzes forum content, uh, of basically what appeared to be, like, suicide notes from incels saying like, "This is it. Um, you won't hear from me again after that." And, um, uh, you know, that's qu- it's quite kind of harrowing to think about that. And y- you could maybe analyze that further and say, did this account ever post again? If not, you can kind of maybe have a conclusion. Uh, I, uh, a really sad case, um, uh, for me a couple of years ago was an incel who he, he, he, um, it has a somewhat happy ending to this story, but I was very worried for a while. Um, uh, an incel who, like, engages in back and forth with me on Twitter and with several others, um, pretty kind of good-natured guy, I don't know who he really is in real life, anonymous, uh, kind of account, but he basically tweeted out a picture of a bullet and said, "Goodbye." And then no one had heard from him for months and months and months and months and months. But he did resurface and he, he's back, he's back with us. But he often quite darkly hints at, uh, suicidality. The incels have quite gallows humor as well. But, uh, yeah, it's a, it's-

   11. CWChris Williamson1:04:16

       It's Posla kind of running rampant here-

   12. WCWilliam Costello1:04:19

       Yes. Yeah. But I think-

   13. CWChris Williamson1:04:21

       ... with the black Posla.

   14. WCWilliam Costello1:04:21

       ... so from extremism point of view, and I'm asked about incels from extremism, I think about it, what does extreme inceldom look like? And to me, it looks more like suicidality than terrorism. And even, like, most of the incel attacks-

   15. CWChris Williamson1:04:35

       Oh, because most of the focus of the incels is on hatred of the self, not on an outward based... Yeah.

   16. WCWilliam Costello1:04:43

       Yes.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:04:43

       So you'll be much more likely to get a drink the Kool-Aid situation than you would be to get a terrorist attack.

   18. WCWilliam Costello1:04:48

       Yes. And if you are to get a, a, like a terrorist attack or a lone wolf lashing out at society, it's kind of suicide in itself, you know? Like, uh, all of them pretty much know they're gonna either die by cop or kill themselves, uh, in the process. But one thing that's also very interesting from the, the actual... even the incel attacks, they've just been more like a lashing out at society in general rather than a specific targeting. Okay, Elliot Rodger did try to specifically target, uh, women, but the rest have just seemed to have like a break from reality and kind of just attack everyone. And there's been a distinct lack of sexual violence. Uh, they don't, like rape alongside their violence, which is, uh, interesting. And, um, you know, the, the rape, um, the hypothesis of rape as a mate-deprived, uh, strategy. So mate-deprived men, uh, are, uh... once, once we were hypothesizing that mate-deprived men would rape more, but it's actually not true. That most rapists are narcissistic, sexually successful men who think they're the ones who actually have the sexual entitlement. You know, incels are always talked about having sexual entitlement and having just too high of standards. That's something we measured in my dissertation and w- we're working on that paper now, is analyzing whether this was true, whether they had just simply too high a mate preferences compared to non-incels, but they didn't. They had significantly lower mate preferences on every metric and overall. And evolutionarily that would make sense, because it wouldn't make sense as an, uh, a strategy, uh, in, in, in the... at our ancestral environment for low mate value men to concentrate their finite mating effort on competing with high value men for high value women. It's just not a good tactic. Uh, so it didn't surprise me at all that that wasn't really true about incels. Um, you know, i- in evolutionary psychology we call that adaptive self-assessment. So you actually, like, lower your standards if you feel like, "Okay, well, what am I... what can I actually realistically attract?" We also found then we analyzed their perceptions of female mate preferences, and we found that they overestimated the importance of physical attractiveness and financial prospects, and underestimated the importance of intelligence, kindness, and humor. But we also found that the ordinary men or the, the non-incel men in our study made the same mistakes. And there's a lot going on here because, you know, you have social desirability bias in studies whereby women might actually, you know, under-report how much they value physical attractiveness or financial resources, because they have... we have robust data that they do actually value those. But there is robust data to show that they do value the personality traits too. So I think incels might not... they might be not as wrong in overestimating the importance of finance and attractiveness, but I think they are wrong in underestimating the, the rest of the stuff too.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:07:40

       Looks, money, status. LMS.

   20. WCWilliam Costello1:07:42

       Right. Right. Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:07:43

       That's the order. And I learned this from Nama, and I said, "Well, hang on, is that the order that it goes in? Looks, money, status?" Yes.

   22. WCWilliam Costello1:07:51

       Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:07:51

       That's what it's got to be. But it didn't make sense to me until you realize that...... for m- many of the guys that are in the incel forums, they are people that are autistic, they're a- a significantly high proportion of people with disabilities, significantly high proportion of people that are from, um, on average, less desirable ethnic backgrounds as well.

   24. WCWilliam Costello1:08:13

       Mm-hmm.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:08:14

       Um, you know, when you bundle all of these things together, it- it does make a little bit more sense about why they would... Because the looks is just, to them, it is a hurdle that cannot be gotten past. So-

   26. WCWilliam Costello1:08:25

       Yes.

   27. CWChris Williamson1:08:25

       ... thinking about this,

9. 1:08:27 – 1:17:59

   The Impact of Social Media on Incels

   1. CWChris Williamson1:08:27

      w- ... how much is the current incel phenomenon being driven by a status-seeking online world, the Instagrams, and then also the online dating with regards to the Tinder, in your view?

   2. WCWilliam Costello1:08:40

      Yeah, I mean, so that's like, online dating is a evolutionary novel, ubiquitous feature of the modern mating market now. And it essentially opens you up to the world's biggest status game. So, you feel like you're competing with, you know, Chad (laughs) , like, and, uh, you know-

   3. CWChris Williamson1:08:55

      Leonardo DiCaprio, now that you're single.

   4. WCWilliam Costello1:08:57

      Right, yeah. On- on one level, you kinda are. You know, women can open their mating pool, they can extend their radius to the next city, they don't have to limit themselves. If you think evolutionarily, we might've encountered perhaps a couple of dozen potential mates in our lifetime. So, persistent rejection would've been perceived as catastrophic. You know, if you, you can rack up more rejection on Tinder now in one afternoon than would've been possible in a lifetime, ancestrally. So, we're kind of maybe wired to perceive rejection as really catastrophic even though, in reality, it doesn't need to be. Re- and realistically, we should be saying, "Oh, there's literally thousands of more fish in the sea. Millions, you know, that'll ... Just go again." But it doesn't. It hurts. Like, rejection hurts. And that's 'cause m- most of the time it was like a- a- a downward spiral. And if one or two rejected you, you had a reputation, they told all the other girls, "Oh, it's a disaster." You know? So, maybe incels are kind of sensitive to that.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:09:54

      It is interesting thinking about how much more status-seeking the world's become, the fact that you have objective metrics of status basically, with ticks and follower counts and likes and stuff like that. It doesn't surprise me that looks and status and money are being seen as something, especially by people that spend a lot of time online and don't get to stress test this in the real world, that, you know, I've got friends at home that are not lookers, not rich, not that smart, but they are funny as hell.

   6. WCWilliam Costello1:10:28

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:10:29

      And they will make everybody in a- in a group laugh. Never had a problem with girls.

   8. WCWilliam Costello1:10:33

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:10:33

      Never had ... Despite from outwardly looking like someone that, you know, probably is on the cusp of incel-dom.

   10. WCWilliam Costello1:10:38

       (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson1:10:38

       But, you know, whatever fever points that person got, all of them got taken from good looks and pumped into 100 max stats.

   12. WCWilliam Costello1:10:46

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:10:46

       But they, I mean, they even have, what's it called? Clownmaxxing? What's that?

   14. WCWilliam Costello1:10:50

       Yeah, anything -maxing is just kind of zeroing in on putting all your effort into that domain and trying to improve. And I- I do agree with you, that you- you don't really have any choice but to compensate. I always make the joke that I compensate with my, for my height, being 5'7 with a nice, charming Irish accent.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:11:06

       (laughs)

   16. WCWilliam Costello1:11:06

       So, that seems to work for me. Um, but, you know, cultivating a winning personality is not that easy. You know, it's not that easy to just say, "Oh, yeah. You're- you're, you don't look that great, but just compensate with a brilliant personality. Just be really funny." You know, and if you're autistic, if you're, um, uh, anxious, that's really difficult. And if you're getting rejected a lot, it- it- it, and we have the halo effect, that we tend to perceive people who are attractive as having more winning personalities anyway. So, there's a whole lot going on there. But yeah, I tend to agree with you that, you know, my kind of intuitive attitude, and I'd never really ... I think each in- incel individually has to take case by case scenario. It's not obvious to me that engaging with the mating market is the best thing to do at all times for every incel. I think it's a case by case scenario. But my intuitive reaction is, yeah, put in the effort. Do- do focus on self-improvement, you know. Uh, and there's studies to show that what women find attractive in, um, in men, uh, is more malleable. You can actually put effort into that. You can make more money, you can get more status, you can, uh, you can even improve your looks perhaps more. Um, the only one, uh, whereas women, physical attractiveness is either there or it isn't, and certainly age, once it's kind of gone, it's gone, kind of thing, uh, for- for women. So, that's, uh, a bit of an im- imbalance there. But the only exception is height. And I know people are gonna criticise me for being concerned about that one, but it is true. There's not really much you can do to change your height. And it seems to be a really significant one for women. Uh, you- uh, you had, um, Logan Ury on, uh, the relationship science director at Hinge, and she talked about how much if women, uh, set their height parameters on a dating app to over six foot, it limits their dating pool to, was it 30%? And then-

   17. CWChris Williamson1:12:52

       85% of people don't, 85% of men don't meet that criteria.

   18. WCWilliam Costello1:12:55

       Whoa, that's even more than I thought. Wow. So, you're just stripping back your mating pool in one fell swoop. And secondly then, if- if it's over 6'3, I think it's just 3% of men will meet that criteria in America. So yeah, really bad. And when you think about sex ratios, if you have a minority in any sex ratio, they call the shots in terms of sociosexuality, so-

   19. CWChris Williamson1:13:16

       Tall guys having a great time on Hinge.

   20. WCWilliam Costello1:13:18

       Right. So, men are, like, uh, more reluctant to commit to long-term mating. And, you know, you've seen the statistics on, uh, you know, the sexlessness that, uh, men younger than 30 reporting having no sex in the last year rose from 8% to, uh, in 2008 to 28% in 2018. But there's another study that, uh, also showed that compared to 2002, men overall had the same number of partners in 2013, but the top 20% of men had a 25% increase in sexual partners, and the top 5% of men had an even more dramatic 38% increase. So, it really is that kind of effective polygyny towards the top where, uh, yeah, the- the minority of men, the- the Chads are actually cleaning up (laughs) in some data.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:14:07

       But we've always had variable mating success amongst men, right?

   22. WCWilliam Costello1:14:11

       Mm-hmm.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:14:12

       So, f- uh, I think ancestrally 40% of men had children-

   24. WCWilliam Costello1:14:16

       Mm-hmm.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:14:16

       ... and 60% didn't, 80, around about 80% of women did and 20% didn't.

   26. WCWilliam Costello1:14:20

       (clears throat)

   27. CWChris Williamson1:14:21

       So, this challenge of having difficulty in finding a mate doesn't seem to be particularly novel.

   28. WCWilliam Costello1:14:26

       No, it's always been, we've always had kind of incels, but maybe they didn't collectively organize or find each other and identify with this aspect o- of their personality. You also had maybe more kind of, uh, medieval type ins- institutions or a- ancient institutions to deal with this surplus of young men. Uh, so even war, sending them raiding and pillaging as Vikings. Vikings would be an example of maybe what you would do with your surplus male population. You'd send them raiding. Uh, Mary Harrington, who I believe you've had on the show as well, she wrote a cool article for UnHerd about incels as the new Vikings, because we no longer have making Vikings out of them or sending them to the monastery as an option to deal with this surplus population of unpartnered young men. But we do seem to have the internet, and that seems to be kind of the, the pacifier, the, that, uh, they're locking into that world.

   29. CWChris Williamson1:15:20

       What was that study that you looked at that discovered the likelihood of incels arising geographically?

   30. WCWilliam Costello1:15:28

       Right. Yeah, so this was a really cool, uh, study that the authors, uh, Rob Brooks and Candice Blake, um, they were kind enough to share it with me, uh, in advance o- of it being published so I could, uh, reference it in my dissertation 'cause it provided, like, a lot of empirical support for my theoretical ideas about this mating crisis. Uh, and they basically found that incels are kind of partially accurate about what's causing their crisis. So, they could actually predict geographic areas of high online incel activity by three variables: high levels of income inequality overall; low gender pay gaps, because gender pay gaps actually alleviate mating market competition for both sexes, because if women are earning more, they're limiting their pool, and they're also competing with more 'cause men don't tend to care about socioeconomic status that much, or, uh, not as much a- as, as women. So, it's like, it, it really narrows their pool; and the third variable was male-biased sex ratios, so in geographic areas where there are fewer single women, more incels. So, it, you know, sexual behavior and even incel identity is sensitive to the local mating ecology, uh, so we can maybe predict areas of more, uh, that might be more, this might be more concerning.
10. 1:17:59 – 1:25:10

    Consequences of the Mating Crisis

    1. CWChris Williamson1:17:59

       it is-

    2. WCWilliam Costello1:17:59

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:17:59

       I mean, the, the sex ratio hypothesis to me just makes so much sense. It's one of those red pills that once you see, you can't unsee it. Right?

Episode duration: 1:25:59