Navigating Modern Relationships

Join us as we delve into Jean Garnett’s provocative essays, including her New York Times piece 'The Trouble was Wanting Men,' and explore the psychological and social intricacies of modern dating, the role of feminism, and the concept of 'hetero-pessimism.' Our discussion takes an analytical approach, drawing parallels and contrasts with urban monoculture, manosphere critiques, and the personal narratives of failed relationships. We also highlight how the dynamics of open relationships, dating communication, and societal expectations can lead to emotional and relational turmoil, presenting a cautionary tale for both men and women in today’s dating landscape.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. Today we are going to be talking about not just a piece that was published in the New York Times called The Trouble was Wanting Men by Jean Garnett.

But some other pieces she wrote leading up to this. Okay, I think. You're getting into her lore. Oh yeah. I've had to break apart these pieces, restructure how they're being delivered. Because in the same way our life of a Cide episode really dug into the life of Anna Vains and threw it, understood one way that the urban monoculture can destroy everything in her life that matters.

This individual, you know, a lot of the manosphere has been examining her takes and just being like, heard or dur like women being. Salty about men you know, making bad decisions and ultimately being a hypocrite. Which, you know, okay, all of that is true, but I think it's more interesting to dive into the psychology and sort of how she spiraled into this position in her life.

And how [00:01:00] feminism can destroy the mind of a woman. Oh. And lead her to absolute emotional ruin in the same way that, you know, we, we talk about sort of the trans mimetic virus can destroy the, the life of like a young autistic person. Sure.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I, and I don't think that feminism, like, like when you see this person's life, you're gonna be like, wow.

Like there's a lot we can learn from this.

Simone Collins: Oh, a cautionary tale. Well, perhaps then we shall share this with our, our. Children when they get older, at least, especially our daughters. I'm curious to see what you find though. Yes, it's not, is there stuff that wasn't obvious to us? Oh, well, just tell me. Let's go, let's, well,

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

What's more interesting when you read sort of, and this is why it's good to peel back into the older stuff as well Yeah. Is when you read her instate, she just appears to be such a vile and hateful person who deserves every bit of sadness that she's experiencing. Okay. Due to living a life that's dedicated to prejudice.

But and, and prejudice against men. But it's How did she get there? [00:02:00] Right? Like, how did she start off a

Simone Collins: little more like optimistic and hopeful. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. She started off with a whole, everything is working and it wasn't even her that I would argue started this, this, this trail of dominoes. But her husband she was married.

Oh, yes. Yes. We'll get into this. Okay. So let's jump into this. Happily Married. I thought this was

Simone Collins: about a, you know, a single young woman who's trying to make it No, no, no, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: If the experts say in my romantic letdowns have some larger social significance, I am not going to argue. The men I want are not wanting me badly enough.

Not communicating with me clearly enough. Not devoting themselves to me, by the way. Like you read that it's like a normal human, and you're like, that comes across as psychotic. Yeah. Little, little entitled, little entitled. Men are horrible because the men who I want are devoting themselves to me Enough.

What do you think she, by the way, if you wanna see a picture of her, I'll put one on screen here because I, I find that that sometimes tells people she is I'd say all the more [00:03:00] attractive side for her age. Normal looking white woman. Okay. All this certainly seems calamitous enough to warrant an ism wait, that they're not devoting themselves to you enough.

The men who you want is calamitous in your mind. The level of entitlement, right? Like you are a walking. Nightmare for a guy. But to continue, men are what is rotten in the state of straightness. And why shouldn't we have an all-inclusive byword for our various pessimisms about them domestic pessimism.

They still do less of the housework in childcare, partner violence, pessimism. Femicide is still gruesomely, routine onic pessimism. The clitoris in its properties still elude many of them, and the perpetually proud masculinist subcultures that have risen, at least in part as a reaction to these pessimisms, keep coughing up new reasons to [00:04:00] fear and rage and complain about men.

And, and, and I just love that all of this here gets framed in the men who I want don't just not just don't want her, but aren't devoting themselves to her.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I also have a beef with people. Who I don't know are, are, are extremely entitled about being pleasured properly. When, like for men, it's so freaking easy.

Like there's literally like a handle and you kind of like, I'm not saying there's not finess to it, but like, it's so easy. Whereas for women it's like, well, some women feel it this way and some women feel it this way. And like it, I, I couldn't, like, if someone was like, pleasure this woman, I'd be like, oh my God, I'm going to die.

Whereas some, if someone was like, pleasure this man, I'd be like, okay, I'm pretty sure like male or female, you can probably figure that out. But if you are given like a random woman, any of us, and someone's holding a gun to her heads and like, you need to make her orgasm, like we're all gonna be like, okay, I guess I'm gonna die.[00:05:00]

And here she's being like, how dare people? I mean, we've already addressed all this stuff around like. You know, violence in, in lesbian relationships being actually pretty high. Right. And

Malcolm Collins: so just to her point there about domestic violence of women if you look at straight violence levels in heterosexual couples mm-hmm.

The violence levels in lesbian couples are way higher. Right. Whereas violence levels in gay male couples are the same as straight couples or less, depending on the study you're looking at.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: Which implies that it is not the men who are engendering the violence. Like we, we can just look at the data.

It's the same as divorce rates. Divorce rates way higher in lesbian communities than in straight communities or, or gay communities.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: We can just look at the rates. It, it's coming from inside the house. Women. But hold on. I, I had pulled that from the center of the article so we can get to like her core complaint and what she's trying to set up here.

This hatred that some women have now of straight dating and the suffering and anxiety that they feel when on the straight dating [00:06:00] marketplace. All right. Have they tried lesbian dating? Like, is that so much better? We'll get to that. We'll get to that. Okay. Very curious. That does come up in here. But we're gonna go back in time and go to what happened, what happened to her last marriage.

'cause clearly she was married, right? Yeah. What happened? One of the reasons my marriage ended was that I fell in love with another man who I'm referred to by his first initial J and people are devoted

Simone Collins: enough to her.

Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on. Hold spontaneously graceful with a soft voice and an inordinate sad smile.

Jay made me laugh, stopping my breath being a quote unquote good guy. He intimated from the jump that he did not know how to quote unquote do relationships, giving me to understand that if I expected one with him,

or as he may have conceptualized it from him. I did so at my peril, which was his peril too, since he'd hate to hurt me still. He pursued me. We [00:07:00] seem to quote unquote be doing something together. So note here, this guy who she pursued, okay. Told her. I am not interested in a, in a serious relationship with you.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and worse, he's doing the classic good guy routine who's not actually a good guy. I just hate to see you be hurt. But if you chase me, that's what's going to happen. So you should stay with your husband, sweetheart. No, seriously. Stay with your husband, sweetheart. Yeah. Like, I'm, I'm not here for you.

Yeah. My husband and I have an open relationship at the time Jay and I met. So the terms of our involvement were at first and limited. And although Jay exerted a pleasant pressure against these limitations, ultimately they suited him. I was the one who violated the terms by finding it intolerable after a while to care that much in a way for one person while being married to another.

I could not disambiguate sex from love, nor love from , [00:08:00] devotion, . Futurity family integration. Things I wanted with from Jay. Even as throughout the year in the half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if. Were a separate being.

An unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reacting to him for a while, while he sad, faced back at me, looked like a box mind. He couldn't talk about it. He wished things were different. Maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now there was really nothing to be done.

And later in this she'll talk about how men and women, just men do not take time to understand what women are really telling them between the lines. And it's men who can't communicate well and men, and this is why dating is so bad for women. And I'm like. B, I [00:09:00] am reading your writing down in a favorable way to you, what this guy told you.

And it seems to me that he was communicating with a, with a fire hose and a siren in your face saying, I will not commit to you. I am using you for sex. Please stop taking this further. I really don't like you in that way, but don't wanna hurt your feelings. And she just refused to listen to what he was loudly and repeatedly communicating to her because it didn't follow what she wanted to be true. And, and this is the thing she's showing that her problem downstream of her own communication failures in not listening to what's being loudly signaled to her.

It seems to me surveying the field of dating as a novice, that this kind of studious ir approachability, male helplessness abounds, I keep encountering and hearing it about men who quote unquote, can't have these ever men heard of, quote, unquote, don't want to? [00:10:00] No. What he was telling you is, I don't want a serious relationship with you.

But he didn't wanna hurt your feelings. So what he said was, oh, I'm just not mature enough for that yet. I'm not in a place in my life where I want that right yet. But what he was telling you in no uncertain terms was, I don't want

Simone Collins: you,

Malcolm Collins: you're just not that good. I want other things. I want to keep playing the field.

You are not worth my time or emotional effort. And you, this woman was unwilling to hear that. And then to go later in the, in the piece she talks about why he refused to start something serious with her after she left her husband. I toppled the whole structure of my life for a man who when I asked him, do you want to be with me or not?

Replied, after a few seconds of silence, I want to be with you and I want to be everything everywhere, all at once. Jay was [00:11:00] referring of course to the 2022. So real sci-fi comedy set across a multitude of parallel universes in which many versions of the protagonist play out many versions of their lives.

I love how he's playing the manic pixie dream boy. Like, like playing this woman like a fiddle while also clearly signaling to her, I only want you for sex.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, I wish I could fob you off to another version of me in another dimension, because that would be great right now. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Because the me in this dimension does not, does not want you be clear.

I have, I have other, other plates I'm juggling right now. You go off and do your own thing. Right. And I think that, when man in the manosphere, you know, talk about a woman where they're like, oh, you know, she destroyed herself on Chad. You know, like alpha widows is, is what they call them. These women who got these great guys and then couldn't accept this is what this form of Alpha talks like.

Okay. They don't talk like, I'm gonna put you down. I'm [00:12:00] gonna, you know, throw you around. I'm gonna, they talk like this to women and women eat out of their hand and destroy their lives chasing these types of men. Okay. Now we're gonna go to a different piece that she wrote scenes from an open marriage.

This was in three years before the piece that you just read above.

Simone Collins: Oh, the before. Hmm. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: About six months after our daughter was born, my husband they's daughter together. Right. God, to destroy this girl's life over her wanting to be with this other guy who told her she wa he wasn't interested. Well, I she's a married woman with a kid.

No

Simone Collins: kidding.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: There's baggage. Oh, ah, okay. Because we're

Malcolm Collins: gonna go over what she wants in a guide, the way she talks about guides, because it's terrible. She's clearly a very vile person. Okay. But how did she get lured into this life of polyamory that seems like it destroyed her marriage and then spit her out in a world where, you know, [00:13:00] she a late thirties, early forties woman is just not desirable.

Hmm. And she thought that she would be desirable to the, I mean, she's desirable to men who wanna pass her around. But she's not desirable to be the one for any guy who she would actually want. Other than her original husband. So how did she end up in this, this open relationship to begin with?

Indeed. About six months after our daughter was born, my husband calmly set the idea on the table like a decorative gun. I said I'd think about it. I couldn't pretend to be that surprised by the proposition or ignorant of my part in engendering it. I was too tired. I was too busy. The baby, the baby, the baby.

I had a deadline. I was reading. I was watching The Sopranos again. I was depressed. I just wanted a nap. Needed a nap ached for a hot, throbbing nap. This might, I figured be quote unquote. Real marriage, harder, deeper marriage, marriage opening. Its cute mouse all the way, and showing [00:14:00] the mess that was back there.

Maybe I thought the libido of a certain kind of woman is an animal that lives a little and then crawls into a cave and lies there panting for a few decades until with a final rabid pant it expires. Could it expire so early or perhaps I was taking a breather postpartum. Understandable. Surely given , how a six and a half pound human body had been slither pulled out of the place.

That's a small

Simone Collins: baby. Oh.

Malcolm Collins: And or one of the places or, or one of the places. Okay. So by the way what you will learn as we go through the later piece, after she left this guy three years later, she is sexually insatiable. Just everything she talks about is who's effing her, how they're effing her, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I cut all that outta this, by the way. You guys are gonna have to hear that for your, for your benefit. But it's clear that her libido had not died. It had died contextually with her husband. [00:15:00] And I think that what we actually see is it might not even be a death of a libido. It might be that, like when, when a, a lot of women have what's called a reactive sexuality, which means that they become aroused when they are.

Put in a sexual scenario. Yeah. And often husbands, especially a progressive husband, like this guy was a feminist wife, don't feel comfortable putting their wives in a sexual scenario when they haven't asked to be put in a sexual scenario.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that this is how libidos die in a lot of marriages.

Yeah. This is

Simone Collins: a super underrated point,

Malcolm Collins: but I'd also note here is this expectation that you need to be having lots of sex with a six months old. Yeah. I, when I have a six months old in the house, I basically have no sex. Like, at first I wouldn't want to risk. No, you've generally had a c-section. It's, it, it could cause scarring that could prevent future embryos.

I mean, I think to a six

Simone Collins: month mark, it's,

Malcolm Collins: it's okay. Yeah. But I'm talking about that six months window.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. I mean, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: whatever. I, I [00:16:00] don't like to risk it, I don't like to risk your body, which carries my kids. Right. Like, and, and I think that a lot of guys hear this and they're like, oh, that's horrible.

Oh, whatever sex. Recreational sex exists entirely. Like the entire reason you want this is to produce offspring. Yeah, yeah. Shouldn't

Simone Collins: be any surprise that a woman who's lactating and sleep deprived and you know, dealing with an well, even more

Malcolm Collins: so, even has the opposite effect. If it could damage, could create scar tissue, which could prevent future embryos from implant that too.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: I think you, you're more likely to have complications in your pregnancy if you get pregnant super, super soon after having a kid. Well, and you're,

Malcolm Collins: and you're cooking yourself. You're cooking yourself because you are allowss your own arousal pattern to limit the number of offspring you have and to hurt your relationship with the woman who is having those future offspring on your behalf.

You know, you shouldn't be trying to get pregnant again six months after the last kid. And people are like, oh, well, you [00:17:00] should have sex for X reason or y reason and reality. No, I don't, I don't think you should. And a lot of people will be like, oh, Malcolm, this is just you being, you know, low, low testosterone or something.

And I point out, because I've also pointed out with my facial structure, but I was recently looking at Nebula. If you know how testosterone affects a person's body, you would know by my facial structure, I actually developed in a very high testosterone environment. And I'm 98% in terms of testosterone production.

Like I'm at the very, I'm like two standard deviations above the norm. I'm in the top 2% of men in testosterone production. But my testosterone production has almost certainly gone down because it goes down when you're in a monogamous, stable relationship and it goes down when you have children with the number of children you have for obvious biological reasons.

And I think that some men just see sex as like something that they need, like food or something like that when it's just not, if it's getting, I think, I think a people

Simone Collins: have, what's the word, perfunctory sex for the same reason that people have perfunctory travel where they're like. I, I'm pretty [00:18:00] sure that it's a sign that I'm not thriving if I'm not going on expensive trips every year, that kind of thing.

So they're like, well, I have to do it because otherwise there must be something wrong with my marriage or something wrong with me, or I'm not manly enough, or something like that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But I think that, you know, it, it is good to translate these, these desires into their purpose, whether you believe God gave you them or whether you believe evolution gave you them.

When you see a, a busty woman and that arouses you, or you see, you know, a character in an anime, let's say dating five women, and you're like, oh, I really like watching this. That is your, your biological response that exists because you are supposed to want to have kids and gives those kids a good childhood.

And so reframing that, I think what what led to a lot of this is her husband wanting more sex. That is, that is functionally what destroyed everything that came downstream. And it's clear given how reactive her sexuality is and how lusty after min she is, that she probably would've been okay with it had he just worked with her to try to find out what works for [00:19:00] her after the kid had grown up enough that they didn't, you know, that they weren't six months old.

Right. What is there to want. After all, he is mine sacredly in sickness and in other states of being, except he is not. And his absolute non-proprietary realness can flash out so suddenly that the spell of matrimonial monotony is reversed and becomes again a free man. And so I note here that even the way she frames her marriage and her vows here were like not that serious the first time he came.

And I'm just jumping around in this case because I don't wanna get that deep into it. But it's interesting to see how a lot of this diving into the world of polyamory before it destroyed their marriage was being framed in her head and in the husband's head. So you can know if this is happening to you.

And it can all seem like it's going okay at first. The first time he came home, boyish whisper, laughing in the dark as he tore off his sweatshirt and climbed into bed. He used the word fun. I had been waiting brace for some seismic [00:20:00] shift, but there he was home and mine again was out so much as a waking the baby, just pee it and VI reminded myself with people, attached through my husband and somebody else moving deliberately, perhaps tenderly in pursuit of each other and pleasure beyond.

But didn't he deserve some compartment of his own? A chamber of mystery? Don't we all? I found I could be happy for my husband in his fun, more than happy. In fact, I could be a real thrill to let your partner go out and give it fully to another woman and then come home and look at you in the eyes and kiss deeply and touch over that.

It is romantic in a way that culturally under scripted moments often are.

Simone Collins: And I, I, this is for some people, I'm sure, for some I know, I know for some people this is a thing

Malcolm Collins: which is funny. And, and people know that like with our relationship, I'm allowed to sleep with other people if I want to. I just don't think it's worth the effort.

But I certainly [00:21:00] you know, wouldn't make it a regular thing. And her husband, you know, clearly made this like an everyday thing that was causing very clear here, stress on her part. And it's also clear that she went into all of this knowing the risk, the inherent risk of an open marriage is exhilarating, but seeing the risk as a positive thing, she had a daughter, right?

Like why is the risk exhilarating? Nothing refines a romance like proximate disaster, but it's not a romance. You have a daughter, your parents, you're not romancing each other. In fact, ours began when at 17 we went home together from the funeral of a mutual friend who had been in on American Airlines Flight 11.

The city was covered in Ash from that fall and US city kids where there was a strong buddy system vibe, like everyone quickly grabbed your buddy. This is not a drill. I still think of that friend whenever I'm traveling alone on a and a plane leaves the ground. I think of my husband at those times too.

[00:22:00] Imagine him mourning me, reviewing our parting final words via text exchange. Cool. Coming. Can you look on the floor in the front seat? As the third round, and now she's talking about a different thing here after the, the funeral friends are talking. And I think that this leans to the point I was making earlier about thinking that sex is, is an absolute part of marriage, like constant sex.

. As the third round of drinks arrived, the woman across from me said was a laugh that she hardly ever had sex anymore. Oh, yeah. Came a voice from farther down the bench. We haven't had sex since H was born. A third agreed that sex was barely a thing lately.

Reflexively, I joined the rush to wrap the initial confe. Confession and assurances. Even the married women with kids seemed in her looks and noises to allow some lessening was inevitable after a while or else outnumbered by the new and newish mothers. She just knew her audience. Only the single woman who listened wide-eyed and wavering in the Raden Freud [00:23:00] excerpts of concealed alarm was left to insist on the value of frequent, high quality effing.

And it's like the only reason you want that effing is because you're hoping one of these guys settles down with you and starts having kids.

Simone Collins: This is so bizarre because all of my friends in high school and everything, we loved romance mangas and whatnot, but like they were probably all asexual. Like there was no lust for boys ever discussed, and I, I can't imagine being, I've never been.

In any conversation with women in which an interest in sex has been expressed, which is so

Malcolm Collins: strange.

Simone Collins: That is, I can't, I can't imagine this meal.

Malcolm Collins: No, but I think that this happens. It's actually interesting that you say this because I, I think that what you're saying is true. You, you do not often see this in young female friend groups.

This is something that begins to happen in the Sex in the City groups which I'll talk about as I go further, where they're dating a chain of men who are using them for sex. And so now the key relationship they have with men is as [00:24:00] well, basically sex toys. Mm-hmm. Now, of course, they don't realize that that's what they've been reduced to.

And that's what this woman has been reduced to after leaving her husband. Mm-hmm. And abandoning her duties as a mother. But it's because they are that, that it's a predominant way that they are relating socially because they're trying desperately to recapture a, a real deep relationship.

Like the one that this Jay guy was, was, was dangling in front of her so that he could use her for sex.

Simone Collins: Wow. Um,

Malcolm Collins: I think that that's what's happening and I think that your experiences are actually correct here. And that the group of girls who get around a table and talk about sex that this is a phenomenon that married women don't often do.

Have you ever

Simone Collins: married? No. Single, no. Young teen ne Never. I mean, I don't know. Like, I just, I, I hung out with nerds. I mean, like, you know, it was anime and yeah, manga and Dr. Who and all that, but like nerds, [00:25:00] they're, they're voracious nerds too. I don't, I just dunno, this is just so strange to me. I wonder if there, there's some kind of selective thing where like, women tend to sort.

And, and just, I don't

Malcolm Collins: think that's true. I remember the girl I dated in college you know, well, we had sex occasionally. I, she was actually one of the people I had sex with the least of, of all the partners. But she had a friend who was just completely asexual and anti anti-sex. And it was like notable to her.

Well, the, I, yeah, I mean, it, it was a big part of this other girl's personality, like, sex is gross.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: like publicly? Yeah, like publicly. It was like part of her thing. That's so weird. I mean,

Simone Collins: I suppose, I don't know, I think anyone making any bit of their sexual part, like their sexual tendencies, part of their identity to me is just bizarre.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I do see that as a little weird. But it's a common thing was in the urban monoculture and everything like that, and people wanting to, you know, discuss it and, and, and make it a key part of their identity. Yeah. And, [00:26:00] and, but the point I was making here is, is these other girls who were married and not having much sex anymore you change your biology is meant to change when you're in a, in a, in a marriage.

Okay. Yeah. And if you, biology is functioning correctly, and keep in mind, biology doesn't always function correctly. Sometimes men find other men attractive. But you as a guy with five kids, if you have the same sexual appetite you did when you had zero kids, you are about as broken as a guy who prefers other men.

It's not the way your biology is supposed to work, for obvious evolutionary reasons. And so careful, you might

Simone Collins: start sounding like Ben Shapiro here, when it's gonna be like, really Malcolm?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I, well, that was one of the times we went viral. When I pointed out to men this is a, the testosterone thing.

And they're like, oh, you know, don't you wanna look high tea? And I was like, high tea is a sign that you're a genetic failure. Yeah. If you're still high tea and middle ages because your, your tea and and sex drive is supposed to drop if you're in a [00:27:00] long-term monogamous relationship with lots of kids.

And so if you still have it at those ages it probably means you're not in a monogamous, it's your

Simone Collins: hormonal throw profile in the death throes of someone who knows that they're about to go terminal.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Your body's basically going for broke because that's, that's not healthy for you to, to, to stay at for a long time.

Right. It causes riskier behavior and stuff like that. And I also to point out like you wouldn't. Wanna take advice from one of these people, either because they're in a mindset like basically what happens to a male brain when they go into father mode versus Jim bro mode is they're going from go for broke.

I need to be the top so I can breed the most to, it's my job to protect my family build alliances and ensure stability within my community. Which it means that they're typically gonna give much better advice and be a much better ally rather than the, the, the more crap than a bucket mentality that is baked into the male brain.

At, at, at those sort of earlier stages where when you are failing in romantic pursuits. But then to continue with this [00:28:00] article I did and do worry especially about the younger girls in their twenties. Were they all right? These kids? How did they feel about being quote unquote on the side?

Occasionally I stumbled into something like outrage on their behalf as I thought I were the spirited friend in the drama. F that guy. Were they being exploited? In fact, wasn't I exploiting them? Outsourcing the labor of care, pleasure and attention affirmation to this scattered, precarious workforce? How sinister in that light in those nights, my husband and I spent scrolling through the faces of sexual supply, our ethic, blatantly consumerists, collecting primary and vivacious thrills that rebounded to our own marriage, strengthening our family through the efforts and maybe even the pain of others.

And I love that she can see sort of how exploitative this is in the way that she was doing it.

Simone Collins: So they're in their thirties and they're both like

Malcolm Collins: helping her husband hook up with [00:29:00] 20 year olds

Simone Collins: teasing on, oh my goodness. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: All right. And she knows it's wrong, but she's like, whatever. But here is how the article ended before we get back to the other article in her how she, how she's sort of thinking about all this.

M is by the way, before I go into this, the husband's girlfriend here's another scene. My husband and daughter and me in the car parked at the station waiting for m we hear the rush of the train, the opening of the doors, the distant announcer's voice. Various strangers emerge in masks, greet, the writers depart.

Suddenly I hear my daughter singing M's. Name, my husband window humming down as he calls out to her. And catching the sight of the familiar baseball hat pulled low over the messy curls. I feel the approach of the world itself coming to puncture the seal, let in some light and air. And so this all felt good to her.

She really talked throughout this article how much she appreciates this in woman helping around the house with chores and with childcare. But you can see that the daughter is beginning to see [00:30:00] M as the mother and not her. Her as the mother even before the de divorce. So at first I felt bad for this husband.

But then when I read this other piece, I was like, oh, he's probably was m now m just seems less crazy than this woman and to have already taken on the role of mother before any of this happened.

But

Simone Collins: anyway, I don't want this life.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I know. But so she's created this, this narrative, so to get back to where we are, okay. Around you know, the men, what was the word she, she used here? Like hetero pessimism or something, right? Like, the, the, the, some women just, it was hetero

Simone Collins: fatalism, fatal

Malcolm Collins: fatalism.

They hate their fate as hetero women because they have to date these horrible, evil things that are men. And so I want to dive into, okay, but. What are you doing? Like if men are these toxic things that are doing all these horrible things [00:31:00] to you, what are your actions like and what are the man's actions like even by your own admission and who is actually sort of the vile one here?

Why is it that the lesbian relationships have the higher rates of spousal abuse? Why is it that they have higher rates of divorce? Why is it that when you get two women together versus a man and a woman, things seem to always be worse? Well, let's get into her own account of her life.

Simone Collins: Okay?

Malcolm Collins: I was looking forward to seeing you again.

He texted me the following week around lunchtime, but I'm going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low frowny face, quote unquote. Totally understand. I replied, but I didn't. Feeble fallible. Looking forward is not longing. A man should want me urgently or not at all. I was about to collapse into a ritual of frustrated, horniness, fantasy, masturbation snacks [00:32:00] when a friend urged me to join her and two other women for dinner.

So keep in mind this was a woman who just before said that her entire arousal system had stopped working and a guy doesn't get back to her fast enough. And is trying to be vulnerable as her, something that she would say that she wanted from men throughout the piece. I'm not gonna read through those parts.

And her response is ugh, gross, but also I need to just go and masturbate and, and eat, like stuff my face. Like what? But anyway, so a friend invites her for dinner with other women in this position. And, and no, you can be like, why is she thinking about sex wise? She talking about. Because when you're used like this as a woman, the way that men keep you on the table is they promise something more.

You know, they dangle something more in front of you. Like this guy is doing, you know, he's like, oh, sorry, can't see you today. Anxiety issues. Let's talk again in a few weeks. And, and so the women who are going through this [00:33:00] are constantly thinking about these men and the way that they are relating to and being related to by these men.

So one of the other women goes, of course, he had anxiety, said one of them, a therapist who sat across from me at the restaurant. Oh dear. Okay. That life that's being alive and going to meet someone you don't know well, yeah. So the other woman beside her, a historian, it's called Sexual Tension. Stay with it for a minute and you might get some they can't said my friend.

Was a triumphant disgust. She told us about a woman she knew that was dating a man from another city after weeks of saying, I can't wait to see you. The man ghosted her during his actual visit, his explanation, he'd been too anxious. Oh, poor baby. Cried the historian, and we all could and moaned, if this was men talking about

Simone Collins: women, can

Malcolm Collins: you

Simone Collins: believe the reaction?

Right? For the

Malcolm Collins: poor widow, Fredy cat, boo boo working themselves into a [00:34:00] frenzy of laughter where men's inability to quote unquote, man up and F us, we are four women at a vegan restaurant in downtown Manhattan. We knew what show we were in and couldn't help but wonder in a smug, chauvinistic way, where are the men who could handle hard stuff like leaving the house for. Sex.

Just a quick reminder for people who don't know this, the sex and the city writer, the person who created this world that this woman is looking up to and trying to recreate, has said that she made a mistake and wishes that instead she had gotten married and had lots of kids, and that the whole sleeping around and dedicating her life to her career was a huge life mistake.

Malcolm Collins: And I'm like, whoa, lady, like, do you not understand that? Let's take the man at his face value here. And he really did have anxiety. So the man had anxiety because he was dating. The type of woman [00:35:00] who liked to go to restaurants was her friends and de masculinize and make fun of him.

By your own admission, it's not just you, it's all of the girls here. Why are guys able to use you and all of these other women without feeling bad about it? Because this is who you are. You dehumanize them in the way that you talk about them. Everything you think say and breathe is toxic. Like would you not see it as a major red flag, even just for a friend as a female?

If you had a female do this in front of you?

Simone Collins: Yes. I would see this as a red flag.

Malcolm Collins: And, and some of these women, you know, making fun of men for having anxiety is a therapist. If you are a man going to see a therapist, and that therapist is a woman, know that this is the type of thing that she's joking about on weekends with the money that you pay her.

You know, just keep that in mind, right. No, I know. It's, it's, it's, [00:36:00] this is where the urban monoculture comes from, right? Like her core happiness throughout this entire piece is belittling the men she is dating to other women. That seems to be the only place that she's still getting happiness from, and yet she wants a man, right?

This is where the head of where Fatalism comes from.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And it's mentally destroying her.

Simone Collins: Yeah. She, she presents and, and seems to hate and belittle men, but she also seems to be largely dependent on them for her physical pleasure and, and yeah, just amusement. So that's not great.

Malcolm Collins: When did men get so anxious about desire?

Ask the therapist and I said, I didn't know. Yes you do. My friend said it was when they were put on notice that they can't just get drunk and grope us. And it's like, but lady, you are the one saying you want these men to be more aggressive. Of course. If you have put doesn't you basically just saying, why can't this guy just get drunk and grope me?

Yeah. What, what? [00:37:00] Of course they have anxiety when they're getting these sorts of missed signals, especially when you consider the consequences of misreading the signals. But let's go to a different part here. I I, I thought that that part was useful so you can get an understanding of like who this person is at their core, right?

Sure.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And then you, you look at her on this market and with this perspective of, I am cursed to have to date the other gender rather than reflecting on her own behavior. And at no point in its entire piece does she once reflect on her own behavior. She seems almost pathologically incapable of it.

There are many roots to the species of disappointment. I am circling here, but however we get there, the complaint is so common, such a cultural narrative staple that the academy is weighing in. We now have a fancy word, hetero pessimism to describe the outlook of straight women fed up with the mating behavior of men coined by the sexual scholar Asin Seran, who later amended it to hetero fatalism.

The term seems at first class to distill [00:38:00] a mood that is no less timely than being timeless. Whereas she just comes across like a sexual predator here, right? Like everything about the men who she is making fun of are expressing their vulnerability, and she is exploiting that.

Simone Collins: She's not even talking about the mating patterns of men because these men clearly don't want to reproduce with.

Malcolm Collins: The women in question, you don't want her. Yeah. It was really, well, I love how she starts with it. It's about the men who I want not desiring me enough. It was really nice in quote, a close friend texted me recently reporting on her third date with a lawyer. He's really sweet and nice to me and good at sex.

No doubt. Something humiliating and nightmarish will occur soon on more than one occasion. When my friend checked in with a lawyer to confirm tentative plans, he did not respond to her for many hours or even a day. Granted, he worked a punishing schedule, but my friend reasoned it took 90 seconds for him to send a quick reply.

The dissonance between his caring and attentive in-person behavior and these silences [00:39:00] confused her. And she mentioned this to him. The lawyer was sorry and that, that he kept her waiting. He hadn't meant to, but he said her complaint got him thinking. He unfortunately wasn't able to escalate whatever was happening between them into a relationship.

My friend clarified that she had not been asking to escalate into anything. No, you literally did ask to escalate. You were saying, why do you only talk to me when you want sex? And he was saying. I thought that's what this was. I thought I had signaled that to you very, very loudly. If you want something more, you're not getting that with me.

And she's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I want to keep doing the sex thing. Treat me however you want. And I'll just keep waiting and then eventually you'll get more time and more into me. But he's, he's telling her, I, I'm not into you that way.

Right? She wants the intimacy and he's signaling that that's not what their relationship is about. Now, note here, what, what does a friend do? My friend clarified that she had not been looking to escalate anything, merely expressing a need for clarity about plans. [00:40:00] He understood that he said, but their quote unquote, communication skills were obviously too different for them to continue dating.

I love how the guy is even letting her down nicely. Like the guy is being nice here. When he says our communication skills are different, he's saying, what the, do you not get? B, I don't wanna talk to you. I'm using you as a sex toy. Like, how do you not understand that, that you want more from me than that just shows that we don't want the same thing, so I'm gonna let you go and pursue life with a guy who does.

He is being imminently kind and you are being a psycho.

Simone Collins: I mean,

Malcolm Collins: not just that, but that her friend couldn't recognize this. And then her friend, when it is relayed to her, couldn't recognize this so much that the original intent of what the guy was saying comes through in her peace. Even the humiliating and nightmarish part she explained to me was not so much the rejection as being cast against her will as quote the woman eager for a relationship end [00:41:00] quote.

The cast against her will as the woman eager for a relationship. But that's what you are. This guy is probably dating and having sex with a bunch of other women. You are just a booty call. In her memoir, fierce Attachments, Vek Gornick describes the anguish of being ignored by a lover to her female friend.

Why I couldn't absorb? She writes with his plunging us back into the cruelty of old fashioned man, woman stuff, turning me into a woman who waits for a phone call that never comes and himself into the man who must avoid the woman who was waiting. But that's what you are. But do you see what I mean here?

Like they have built this nightmare scenario about to around themselves by refusing to accept reality that they are not desired by the tech category of men that they desire. And that they need to set their sights significantly lower. And many of the things that they see of as flaws or things that they're just gonna have to bite the bullet [00:42:00] on, she's never gonna be able to get a guy as good as her original husband again.

I wish, because, you know, she's getting older every year and he's getting older every year and apparently he can still date 20 year olds. To skip to a different part in the piece, I wish I could just be gay with you, she said, and I said, I wish that too. So much. This was our commiserate routine, what Sarasin might call performative dis.

A ation with heterosexuality in quote or our spin on quote, take my wife please to my straightness, please take my attraction to men. A note. All of your conversations, it seems like, are just about how much you hate the people you are dating. Like of course that's gonna spiral you into worse and worse relationships always.

But it seems to be the only thing you find happiness in. And not that women wouldn't do that, right? They are evolved to be that way to an extent.

Simone Collins: What do you mean? To present the men that they're with? No.

Malcolm Collins: To gain benefit from gossiping? No. Okay. They're [00:43:00] going to look for, with their female community to have conversations that are gossip full.

Is era fatalism a useful concept? I took it up for a while, considered the positions the writer and gender scholar, Sarah Abram, had advanced the idea of quote complaints as feminist pedagogy in quote, arguing that to b***h is inherently transgressive. So note here she, even the woman who had invented this term, invented it with the idea that women should be b******g a lot.

You know, so you know that she does this a lot and I don't think that they should be I wouldn't appreciate my wife going around and b******g a lot. Well, in

Simone Collins: general philosophy that involves leaning into misery and negativity doesn't seem very productive.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So what is she like when she's dating people these days?

If you wanna get a look inside her dating life.

Simone Collins: Sure. On the way to

Malcolm Collins: his place I had been texting was my aunt, quote word from an expert. In quote, [00:44:00] she wrote, wait till he wants it so bad that he's nutsy. Cuckoo sounds facile, but man, truer words have never been spoken. Make him suffer, is my mantra.

Exclamation mark. I kept catching myself, staring at his mouth, his bottom lips. He told me to slow down. He needed me to get a better sense of me and how I worked. So note here, she thinks he's making him wait. He on the first date is like,

Simone Collins: whoa, whoa,

Malcolm Collins: whoa, whoa, whoa. You need to slow down. I lay back to murmur.

Let, and, and by the way, she ends up sleeping with him on the first date. It, it's, I'm not gonna get into all that, but I laid back to murmur, let him try stuff, and he warmed to his own control, putting his mouse right up to mine, then pulling away when I tried to engage his tongue, I see what you are, he said, finally, pinning my forearm.

You are a bratty sub. He held himself there just at every reach. Breathing on me. I'd like to make you wait. He said he did make me wait. And then again, then everything that happened between them, which nobody needs to [00:45:00] hear. And I find it weird that you wrote in an article. I guess you thought it was hot, but it just shows that you apparently have like five intimate encounters that you're able to describe in this article.

And clearly this is a guy who's, you know, been involved in the BDSM scene been involved in sleeping around a lot, given the way that he's framing you and is using you for sex. That's why he's framing you this way even to yourself. When my friend complained about the lawyer, I expressed outrage at his behavior and worked my way quite naturally, along a well worn groove to come to nation of all.

Okay, most men, as incapable of upholding basic standards of communication and care. But he's communicating very clearly. It is you and your friend who aren't listening. Like as a woman even you can understand what he's trying to tell her, right? Or, or am I crazy Here? Is this like man language. If a guy was like, look, I don't have time for you.

And then you're like, well, I need more of your time. And he said, well, clearly, you know, we're having trouble communicating. We should end this relationship.

Simone Collins: That's pretty clear. Yeah. Yeah. [00:46:00] That's, that's not ambiguous.

Malcolm Collins: I was thinking of course about Mr. J and I am not proud that my instinct response to the shame of being gender stereotyped by life is to pay another stereotype forward.

Men suck, groundbreaking, exclamation. But Mr. Jay never did anything to you. He told you exactly that he didn't want you. This lawyer told you exactly what he wanted. That's the other thing about this piece is the minute it seemed to be so upstanding and yet she's framing them as horrible because they don't.

Do what she wants. This would be like a man hating you because you turned him down, right? Like, you know, you're like, oh, you know, somebody was your friend. And then they're like, Hey, can I sleep with you? And you're like, no, you can't sleep with me. I just want you for friendship. And they're like, well, you know, okay.

I guess I'm, I'm sort of bummed about that. But you know, and, and then they're like, you know, she's just using me to her friends. And you'd be like, what a sicko saying to say, but these men, just as clearly as you are to that friend are saying, I just want you for sex. I don't want the friendship. I don't want the [00:47:00] intimacy.

That said, men struggle to communicate in romantic relationships is widespread enough to have earned psychological designation, normative male Alex, or the condition of being unable to put words into emotions. And the note here, she had the whole thing about emotional labor and new terms for emotional labor, hermetic labor, a new way for women to hate on men.

Simone Collins: What is hermetic labor vis-a-vis emotional labor?

Malcolm Collins: So, she calls the work women do to demystify male cues hermetic layer and posits it as a form of gender exploitation in intimate relationships. So her almost intentionally misunderstanding what these various guys in her life are telling her in her friend.

Is them exploiting her? No, she's exploiting herself. Mm-hmm. But for another part I found interesting here the stranger waiting at my back. Corner table [00:48:00] looked a bit square than my average date. His hair apparently washed cut and he wore a button down short. But some restless mischief played on his face bearing itself fully in our laugh.

Our conversation with brisk ingesting, I got the impression that he was enjoying my company but was more bonus than criteria for him. He was partnered already. He had told me and seeking only compassionate sex. His dating profile referenced this clearly below the picture of him wearing a blue blazer, petting a donkey's head.

So now she's going on dates with people who tell her, I literally just want you for sex. That was in my dating profile. That is all you are to me. And getting mad that they're not giving her more. We turned eventually to the subject of erotic temperament. He was interested in the possibilities that arise between people with any in eventuality of marriage, procreation, or fidelity was so to speak, taken off the table.

What might then happen in bed? That community in that world, watching his clean cut boyish [00:49:00] form and listening to him speak with eloquent enthusiasm of a connoisseur. The phrase that occurred to me was sex nerd mini dabbler in non-monogamy were not really, he noted was a laugh quoting from Pusha T about that life.

He was, I meet his type around sometimes fluent in the language of polyamory, waving his respectful desire, like a plastic saver, pew pew. Why would you play with just one toy when you can take turns with all the toys and that's what you are, a toy, a sex toy to somebody like him. Why at the same time vaguely subverting something capitalism.

I love that she's like proud of what he's doing with her. And he's telling her, I don't want this thing that you want. Right? I, I find this wild. This men can't communicate and she just so clearly makes it. And then yeah, she

Simone Collins: proceeds to give. A ton of examples of men really clearly communicating it.

The theme isn't that men can't communicate. The theme is that men are not communicating the message that she desires.

Malcolm Collins: [00:50:00] Exactly. Which is that they want her, which they don't.

Simone Collins: But that, I mean, in the first quote that you led with in this discussion, that is what she said. She said the problem was they don't want her enough.

It wasn't necessarily that they weren't communicating it was that they don't want her, they don't want, they don't want to commit to her in any meaningful way, and she doesn't seem to understand that casual sex does not equal slavish devotion and obsession.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And if you wanna see how she screw things up was this one you're flattering. The men, a former lover, wrote me after I sent him a partial draft of this essay. They never get to be real. And you see the men in her life just use her like clearly. She's not flattering the men in this piece, but the guy knows that's what she wants to hear.

So she made easier to use. They, they used to confirm a story about disappointment and frustration. This man I met last fall when he was like me, [00:51:00] reeling for romantic rejection. And within half an hour we lunged at each other as though by tacit agreement to beat each other's comforting or orgasm, giving blankets for a time.

We traded obsessive accounts of failed relationships, cheered each other on through the rigors of no contact, watched Albert Burt's movies, belted Weezer songs, and karaoke tracks on his couch. Whatever was happening between us went on for about six weeks, at which point I became annoyed that he was withholding something from me, though I couldn't say what exactly.

So you found a guy that liked doing what you like to do most, which is. B***h about other people. And you feel like he's withholding something from you because again, he doesn't want a real relationship with you and accused him of coldness and accused him of being unfair and so on. The familiar female demanded male withdraw pattern descended on us like a polarizing spell.

Unlike some other exchanges of my past, this one had an oddly mechanical quality and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Eventually I admitted to him that it felt more natural to me to default to quote, unquote, wounded female rather than assume responsibility for my [00:52:00] desires. Any self-realization here, your desires.

So instead of recognizing your desires, you defaulted to the internal framing of a wounded female. For his part, he described a large, looming ex who adapted the use of guilt and left its mark. And this is clearly what she was doing. She was using guilt like, look at you. You're oppressing me. You're hurting me.

And, and it's showing that that is something that she is doing tacitly. She's, she's admitting that one guy I went on with spoke of a hint of longing about the relationship between his grandparents who barely spoke to each other before getting married as teenagers in Sicily, then thrown together by slim pickings village life, a adolescent hormones and the oppressive myth of female honor.

What a system, what a gamble. And then both people were trapped for life, but at least you were spared the anxiety of choice. At least there was that. But what I love is you don't actually get choice because nobody who you want seems to want you. And then there's another part where she goes deep into maybe I am [00:53:00] a romantic and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah about that.

But I wanna get your thoughts on this person. 'cause I think you can get a full picture of their life and what it's like to be a woman on the dating market these days. And what it might feel like to you to be on the dating market if you're out sleeping around. I would say if you're a young woman and you're listening to this, this is what dating is like.

If you hit your mid thirties, you need to get off the market before your mid thirties. Your, your life will become a health thing. Like either you withdraw from men or you, you end up being passed around by this woman, by men who clearly don't care about you.

Simone Collins: I think there are some highly educated professionals who are in their thirties really looking to get married who are just going for it.

And I think that those, those dates are far more like the dates that I would wanna go on, which is like, okay, what do you want? Like, there's that famous, not famous, but like people often inc cite that, that scene in like a, I don't even some random show where it's some couples having a very unromantic discussion about like how they would be married [00:54:00] and they ultimately decide not to get married.

'cause they're like, well no, I'm not meeting with a mother-in-law or something like that. But it's just kind of like these, these, these cold negotiations about potential married life together and that would be okay.

Speaker: Melanie, I'm single. You're single. What do you say? We get married.

What's your offer? Single rich male seeks matrimony primary residence, Westchester County. Would you be open to considering a secondary residence in Manhattan? Central Park, west South. Done time Spent together

Speaker 2: eight hours, five days a week.

Speaker: Seven hours, 12 hours, weekends,

Speaker 2: 55 hours. Aggregate specifics to be determined later.

Speaker: I'm amenable to that. Children, 1, 3, 2, done. But one of 'em has to be a male.

Speaker 2: I'll see what I can do. Vacations.

Speaker: December. Hawaii.

Speaker 2: June. The vineyard.

Speaker: June. Fun. But Hawaii.

Speaker 2: Nope. The vineyard.

Speaker: Is that a deal breaker for you?

Speaker 2: I'm afraid so.

Speaker: Me too. Well, we gave it a shot.

Simone Collins: And I think that that exists. It's just completely unmoor. From this world of mostly casual sex among married, well, you know, I [00:55:00] married marriage well, I think this guy, he

Malcolm Collins: talked about his, his grandparents in Sicily and saying that's what he wants with signaling to her, Hey, let's have a real conversation about marriage or let's go about,

Simone Collins: yeah, but she doesn't want that.

So yeah, like there, there are clearly different markets. I think that the really tragic thing that happens to many young women in their twenties is they end up on this, this sexually, this casual sex market. Either because they've been told to just explore in their twenties as I was, but I just didn't.

Or because they, they don't realize and they think that this is just, these, and all, all dating markets for marriage and for just fun are all the same. So they're just on it and they get trapped in it.

Malcolm Collins: I think she wants the guy who she saw in romcoms growing up, she wants to manic pixie dream boy.

That's what Jay was simulating for her. But when Jay was simulating that for her, when these other guys have simulated that for her, that's not their real personality. It's something they're doing to get sex from her. I

Simone Collins: don't know. She seems to just be interested in the individual encounters. What confuses me is that she does [00:56:00] want more when she seems to be so keen on just the passionate sex.

So I'm, I'm confused. I feel like she just keeps ruining it when she could just be getting casual sex and if she filled her pipeline more. Like any, any normal guy who wants the same thing that she proposes to want, aside from this extra commitment, blah, blah blah, is, you know, I wanna, if, if I want to physically satisfy myself in a sexual way okay, great.

And, and where she gets frustrated is the guys are too anxious to come out or whatever, but like then you should have a backup r of guys that she can just text and be like you up and then they can meet up and have their resignation and it's great. So what confuses me is that she seems to really enjoy just the sex, and yet I don't even know if she wants the commitment.

She seems to enjoy complaining about the commitment and maybe thinks that it is important to do so, or else she'll come across as too va.

Malcolm Collins: And I think the framing of all of this around the [00:57:00] sex and the city, like this is what she knows, hanging out with a friend group who just sits around complaining about men.

Mm. Right. And so even if she's had a potentially good relationship with a man at the time, she, like the, the friend who was dating the lawyer and everything was going well, and she was like, I need to find something to be worried about. Right? Like, obviously things are going to go bad. Because that's the framing I have of what it means to be in a relationship with a man.

Whereas I didn't see this as a woman I dated, I did not have many, like actually negative relationships with women. And yeah. And she

Simone Collins: wants to see this as negative, I think. Yeah. Maybe it's part of the version of feminism that she subscribes to where of course these matter terrible. Of course this is the worst.

Yeah. So that, that could, that would make a lot more sense to me than. Whatever it is she, she says she's doing. Because she's not, she's so vague about what she even means by commitment. I mean, I don't think any reasonable person, and she's clearly educated. I don't like her writing style. 'cause I find it kind of hard to follow and understand.

She's trying [00:58:00] to be very like, floored and, and poetic. But yeah, I know.

Malcolm Collins: I, I understand. Not

Simone Collins: in a good way. I mean I, I, I can appreciate the good turn of phrase, but that just ain't it for me at least. And I, I think that, yeah, I, she, she's only saying these things that she logically knows are entitled and preposterous and impossible because she needs to have something that she can resent about men that she herself is just exploiting.

As much as they are maybe explaining. No, I mean,

Malcolm Collins: it's mutual exploitation. Yeah. That, that she is exploiting in a way that ultimately frustrates her. Like, I mean, well I don't,

Simone Collins: I don't know if those matter are exploiting her because I, the exploitation isn't in the sex, in the casual sex. 'cause that's mutually agreed to.

I think the exploitation is in the, the act of trouncing on these men's reputation mental health. Well, I, I think, think in

Malcolm Collins: demanding from them something that they've clearly signaled they're not interested in. Mm-hmm. This is as exploitative as the man who pushes past the sexual boundaries of women.

And then, yeah,

Simone Collins: [00:59:00] conversation at lunch. If this was a bunch of men talking about women, why don't they just get over it and have sex with like what? That you can't, well that's,

Malcolm Collins: and men really, by the way, adult men really do not talk about women this way, that frequently. I, I, I have never heard one of my friends in private ever talk about women this way.

I mean, it might be the guys, I'm Wiz guys might have done this in previous generation. I get the impression that like boomers in, in, maybe like in Trump's generation, people did that. It seems like

Simone Collins: a grabber by the posty kind of conversation. It's just so crazy that like, but that these are the women who put on pussy hats and yet they are having.

The grab him by the pussy situ like conversation. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah. But I don't think men of my generation talk about women in these things.

Simone Collins: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Locker room talk these days is about like video games not women.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. That that is, I know like actually like all the women are in the other room thinking like, what is he talking

Simone Collins: about me?

What he saying about me?

Malcolm Collins: And they're like talking about, it's like video games and like War Hammer. Exactly. No, literally like I go see like [01:00:00] my brother and it's like pulls me aside. 'cause he knows he's not allowed to talk about video games in front of his wife. 'cause it annoys her because we talked too much about video games and she can't follow.

And so he is like, pulls me aside. He's like, Hey, have you played the new whatever? I know you're great. It's so great. Yeah. That's love you. I love you too. Thank you for not being this way, and thank you for saving me from this, this carousel of, of horribleness. And I think for a lot of guys, what you need to take away from this is if you think that women who are writing the quote unquote caught carousel or the quote unquote alpha widows, if you think that it is traditionally masculine men who you are losing to, it is not, it is men who play these roles for them but don't play these roles for them because the type of fish you catch with that lure is psycho like this.

Yeah. And

Simone Collins: these are, these are not women that I've encountered. I, well, no. I just like, I have not met women like this. That's why this is so weird to hear. So yeah. I [01:01:00] think you've made this point in other podcasts in the New York Times,

Malcolm Collins: it's been like some random, I know,

Simone Collins: but still Red pill men are like, why are women so terrible?

And it's because they're selecting for this really weird population and like, where are all the good women? Like. They're there. You've, you've just gone to like, you, you want bread and you've gone to a butcher shop and, and I don't know what to tell you, which means by

Malcolm Collins: this is that the tactics that you're using, like a lure catches a specific kind of fish or a specific kind of woman where they're going to

Simone Collins: the wrong marketplace.

I mean, the, the manic, the place where you go to look for women is going to influence the type of women that you get.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But the manic, pixie dream girl, boy thing that catches one type of woman, the tough, dark triad frame thing that catches another type of women. Both of these types of women are trash.

You know, the, the I mean my thing was the whole intellectual, nerdy thing. It caught a really good, good group of women. Yeah. Allall need to go to

Simone Collins: more anime conventions to find women.

Malcolm Collins: They think the women I've dated, I, I really like them as people. Like I, I feel [01:02:00] like I had a lot of, no, they're people I've,

Simone Collins: I've yet to encounter stories of, or IRL meetings with ex-girlfriends of yours that.

I haven't found to be fantastic people who I wouldn't wanna be friends with. So yeah. All right. I love you dear Simone. Love you too. Gorgeous. The other link is ready to go, so I'll see when they. It could be a little brighter. I was just listening to a lecture on the life of Laura Ingles Wilder. She's the author of The Little House on the Prairie Books, which are, I mean, they're, they're not like 100% accurate. They're based on her memories of her childhood in like the mid 18 hundreds in homesteads, largely in, in, on the Prairie in the us.

And man, life is so much better now. It was rough. And I remember reading those books as a kid with my mom and just thinking about how romantic it all was. And I'm going back and I'm thinking about what she actually was living. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Thank you. [01:03:00] Absolutely not. She had a little brother who died in infancy.

They, they lived in a, I I thought that this idea of living in a sad house at the time sounded so romantic and wonderful. But no, they're, they're living in a. In a dirt hole that, that is what a saw house said somehow, you know, her sister went blind. Oh, you know, just 'cause, you know, they thought it was scarlet fever, but it was probably some form of like cephalic, like, like her brain sw was swelled so much that she went blind.

Like, I just no know. This is not romantic. This is not, you don't want that. You don't. And we're so freaking lucky. I mean, I still like Marvel, the fact that we get to take warm water showers. I feel like everyone should live at least a month with either no running water or at least only cold showers. Like, I did that for a month in Mexico and it was, and I, I'm too OCD to not take a shower every day.

So I still had to do it even though it was like.

Malcolm Collins: [01:04:00] No, I've lived on boats a number of times. Oh yeah. Where I had to do that. That's not, and it's, it's worse on a boat because you're constantly covered in sea air and everything like that. Oh, yeah.

Simone Collins: You, you're so sticky and gross. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You're constantly sticky in growth and everything sticking together and ugh.

Well,

Simone Collins: and to think what it was like for families who crossed the Atlantic or any Oh yeah. None would've

Malcolm Collins: been able to take fresh water showers. No. Or any showers.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe you pull up a bucket of sea water, but I mean, probably not even that. My gosh. Duh. Yeah, just the luxury living. Like, I was just thinking too, everyone's like, oh, I mean, like, and now I'm almost on sourdough sourdough everything.

I was sourdough every day making all my sourdough, my sourdough starter. But like, okay. And I think a lot of people making them and their jams with their chickens and like, we're kind of getting in that direction. Right. But like most of their meals were just basically flavorless you, you know, like just the, this is not.

I love fresh homemade, you know, scratch simple [01:05:00] ingredient meals, but I love that tonight I'm making you fu I love that, that we have gochujang paste or sauce, like in our refrigerator. Like we live such luxurious lives. Oh no, I

Malcolm Collins: can't even, yeah. And the, the perfect sycophantic assistance to tell us everything we wanna hear about ourselves in the form of ai.

Right,

Simone Collins: right. Like our, our primary I, that's like the gout of our times, right? Like before it is

Malcolm Collins: actually, it is the gout of our times. Like Uhhuh Doubt came because like, they got sugar for the first time and they were just like all, you're like too much

Simone Collins: fat and salt or something.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Anyway I will get started here.

Let's do it. I'm excited. You're, you're my palate

Simone Collins: cleanser of the day after all the nonsense.

Malcolm Collins: You, it is funny. I've been reading more. I'm so addicted to romance, novel romance mangas, by the way. They're clearly made for women. I got into, because I read that first one 'cause we were doing the Omega verse episode, and I was like, are there any omega verses that a man might like?

And then I found one that was only women. And so I was like, okay, this might be interesting. [01:06:00] But then after that, because it was a villainous one, you know, somebody waking up in the body of a villainist, I just started going into the villain scenario is case, which were often like female romances.

And I realized why I like them today. Okay. Why so much. It's, it's because I really like, as you know, from like me watching shows where the protagonist is like a genuinely cruel villain,

Simone Collins: 100%.

Malcolm Collins: That is my jam. And the thing is, is that when people write books for male audiences, where the males supposed to imagine themselves as a protagonist, they always put too many, like qualifiers in for them actually being like good people.

But when it's about the woman supposed to be desiring the protagonist, they really don't mind leaning hard on dark triad traits. Oh, of course. Of course. Right? And so, and so, they're much more villainous. And, and I'm just like, yeah, you go. [01:07:00] And, and always, or very frequently, the logic behind their quote unquote, like ruthless actions is just, it's the most logical and efficient outcome, which means they're making stupid choices less, which I love.

Like if somebody annoys them in court, they're just like, kill them. Like, what? I don't wanna risk this.

Simone Collins: Very fun. That is, that is really funny.

Malcolm Collins: Right. You there? Women, women liking b******s. It does me a, a solid and people will know this 'cause I do. Its okay. Scenarios with ai. I'm gonna begin publishing some new ones soon that are really, really good because we've got our own AI system working on like the internal server as well enough.

That'll eventually be on our FB AI that I can create good stories with it potentially better than the original one I was making. But anyway those are available at Patreon followers and we do them in audiobook.

Speaker 3: Okay, what are you doing?[01:08:00]

You're gonna do it.

Speaker 5: Titan jump my knee

Speaker 7: Titan. Show me what you're holding this.

It's a pregnant woman, towers man. Here we go.

Get this out.

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