Abortion, Friendships & Dad Bods - Dr Jaimie Krems
Dr Jaimie Krems (guest), Chris Williamson (host)
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Dr Jaimie Krems and Chris Williamson, Abortion, Friendships & Dad Bods - Dr Jaimie Krems explores female Friendships, Sexual Politics, and Hidden Evolutionary Strategies Explained Dr. Jaimie Krems and Chris Williamson explore how male and female friendships differ structurally and psychologically, emphasizing women's intense dyadic bonds, vulnerability to jealousy, and complex alliance dynamics. They discuss how venting, gossip, and wardrobe choices function as strategic social signals in female intrasexual competition, including reputation management around promiscuity and loyalty.
Female Friendships, Sexual Politics, and Hidden Evolutionary Strategies Explained
Dr. Jaimie Krems and Chris Williamson explore how male and female friendships differ structurally and psychologically, emphasizing women's intense dyadic bonds, vulnerability to jealousy, and complex alliance dynamics. They discuss how venting, gossip, and wardrobe choices function as strategic social signals in female intrasexual competition, including reputation management around promiscuity and loyalty.
The conversation then connects sexual strategies to broader moral and political attitudes, arguing that opposition to abortion, contraception, and casual sex often reflects underlying mating strategies more than explicit moral reasoning. They also examine how body shape versus body size affects stigma, why 'dad bods' can signal good fathering, and how casual sex is wrongly equated with low self-esteem in women.
Throughout, Krems frames friendship as an underappreciated but evolutionarily central domain, with jealousy and friend-guarding serving adaptive functions similar to mate-guarding. She concludes by outlining new cross-cultural research on what makes a “good friend” and urging greater scientific and personal attention to the complexities of adult friendships.
Key Takeaways
Male and female friendships are built differently and break differently.
Men tend to have larger, looser, activity-based groups that tolerate conflict and reconcile more; women favor intense, one-on-one emotional bonds that are more fragile and can end acrimoniously because of shared secrets and higher relational investment.
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Venting can be a covert competitive tactic that protects your own reputation.
Framing derogation as emotional venting (“I’m so frustrated, she canceled again…”) harms the target’s reputation as much as overt insults but makes the venter seem less malicious, preserving their likability and perceived non-aggressiveness.
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Female competition centers on hidden traits and reputations that are hard to disprove.
Accusations about promiscuity, loyalty, and trustworthiness are potent because women’s sociosexual behavior is less observable and harder to ‘refute’ than men’s resource cues, making reputation management crucial in female social and mating markets.
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Wardrobe choices are strategic responses to female social environments, not just male gaze.
Women dress more modestly when entering new female groups to avoid aggression and exclusion, because revealing clothing signals sexual availability that other women may see as a threat to mates and to the “price” of sex in the local mating market.
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Opposition to abortion often reflects mating strategies more than stated moral concerns.
People with more restricted, long-term sexual strategies benefit if casual sex is costly or risky; Krems’ data show that those who say “abortion is murder” preferentially support policies that punish women rather than equally life-saving measures like better neonatal care or contraception, indicating a strategic interest in constraining sexual freedom.
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Body shape can outweigh body size in social judgments, especially for women.
Two women with identical BMI are judged very differently if one carries fat on the hips/thighs (hourglass) versus the abdomen; abdominal fat triggers harsher stigma and negative stereotypes, while in men a moderate ‘dad bod’ gut can even cue greater assumed parental investment.
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The belief that sexually active women have low self-esteem is widespread and wrong.
Both men and women stereotype women who enjoy casual sex as having lower self-esteem than monogamous women—even when told the former are happy with their choices—yet participants’ own behavior and self-esteem show no consistent link, suggesting a socially useful but inaccurate stereotype, especially for female competition.
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Notable Quotes
“Female friendships tend to be shorter lived and more fragile than these more robust multi-male friendship groups.”
— Dr. Jaimie Krems
“You can’t show everybody how little sex you’re having.”
— Chris Williamson
“We’ve cast these challenges as dyadic challenges, but we haven’t thought about the fact that my friends inevitably and frequently interact with people who aren’t me—and those interactions affect my friendship and me.”
— Dr. Jaimie Krems
“If it’s so and solely maladaptive, selection would’ve gotten rid of it… jealousy is probably not so and solely maladaptive.”
— Dr. Jaimie Krems
“Friendship is an umbrella term for about 60 different challenges… maybe we should pay as much attention to our friendships as we do about where our genitals go.”
— Dr. Jaimie Krems
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can individuals practically use the idea of ‘friend-guarding’ without tipping into unhealthy jealousy or neediness in their friendships?
Dr. ...
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If female competition is so reputation-focused and covert, what concrete steps can women take to protect themselves from unfair reputational attacks within friend groups or workplaces?
The conversation then connects sexual strategies to broader moral and political attitudes, arguing that opposition to abortion, contraception, and casual sex often reflects underlying mating strategies more than explicit moral reasoning. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How might understanding that abortion attitudes often track mating strategy—not just stated morality—change the way we design policy debates or public messaging?
Throughout, Krems frames friendship as an underappreciated but evolutionarily central domain, with jealousy and friend-guarding serving adaptive functions similar to mate-guarding. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What would a science-based ‘how to be a good friend’ framework actually look like, and how would it differ for men’s and women’s typical friendship styles?
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Given the mismatch between stereotypes and reality about casual sex and self-esteem, how can we challenge these beliefs without triggering defensive backlash from both men and women?
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Transcript Preview
Among women, for example, chastity is a big thing. Males really prefer fidelity and chastity in female mates. If a woman gains a reputation as being unfaithful or sexually promiscuous, that's a really hard reputation to do away with, right? But it's-
You can't show everybody how little sex you're having.
Exactly. Exactly. (air whooshes)
How do male and female friendships differ?
Oh, God, how much time do you have? Um, okay. So, uh, we're not gonna start with the easy stuff. Um, structurally, they differ and terms of the, uh... So, males typically form these less emotionally close, looser, but multi-male friendship groups. Females tend to form really emotionally intense and close dyadic relationships, so female-female relationships. Um, that's one of the biggest ways that they differ, because it has all kinds of implications for what happens when those friendships break up. Um, female friendships tend to be shorter lived and more fragile than these more robust multi-male friendship groups. It has implications for the acrimonious end. Um, women share much more, uh, intimate details with one another, and this information can be ammunition that, uh, friends can use against each other when this friendship breaks up. Um, they also spend so much time together, so when the friendship does break up, there can be huge grief at that. Um, and I could go on and on, talking for about four hours about it, but that's, those are some of the ways.
Why would it be adaptive for women to have fewer friends with deeper connection versus men having a broader friend group?
Yeah, we don't know. (laughs) Um, it's one of the-
(laughs)
It's... Honestly, we don't. I'll probably say that a ton. So, we do have really great evidence from non-human primate work, um, Susan Perry's lab at UCLA, Joan Silk who is at ASU, um, and that work suggests that among non-human primate females, so capuchins, uh, baboons, having just a few close female friends can increase the females' own longevity and the health and longevity of her offspring. So, it does seem like there are strong links between, uh, female friendship and female fitness. There is some indication that perhaps in humans as well, so, uh, Stacey Rukis' work, um, perhaps in humans as well, female friendship is also fitness-enhancing. Um, our friends do a lot of good things for us. But why that would be different among females versus males, that's a really great question. And in humans, yeah, we don't know.
Would it be a potential case that with alloparenting, the shared parenting of your child amongst usually family members, but then sometimes super close friends as well, the cost of choosing a wrong friend to look after your child is so great that the threshold for you to call them a good friend needs to be higher than for men? If you're going to go and try and take down some mammoth that you're almost certainly going to fail at doing, you don't mind who it is that you go with, right?
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