Anthropology of What Early Americans Wanted in a Wife

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm delve into the concept of pronatalism through the lens of U.S. cultural anthropology. They discuss various historical perspectives on fertility and family planning, particularly examining how different American cultural groups viewed marriage, sexuality, and the ideal qualities of a wife. The discussion touches on the often proposed but overly simplistic solutions from certain modern perspectives, such as banning condoms and pornography, and contrasts these with the historical realities and cultural practices of early America. The episode covers a wide range of topics, from the Puritans' value of industriousness and intellectual conversation, to the Backwoods people's emphasis on martial prowess in women, and the Southern aristocrats' focus on beauty and social grace. The hosts also explore the implications of these historical practices for contemporary fertility issues, stressing that arousal and sexuality have long been decoupled from reproductive motivations. They argue that understanding these historical and cultural contexts is crucial for forming effective modern policies and personal decisions related to family planning and fertility.

[00:00:00]

Speaker: Hello, Simone! Today is going to be an exciting episode because we are going to, studying pronatalism through the lens of U. S. cultural anthropology.

Speaker 2: Ooh, academic!

Speaker: Yes, with the idea being. Right now, if you look at, like, the default plans for fixing pro natalism that I often hear on parts of the right, it's like, well, let's ban condoms, and let's ban porn, and let's ban, you know, whatever, you know, right?

And it's like, Okay, so this would increase fertility rates if, historically speaking, the primary reason people had kids was that they couldn't figure out how not to control their sexual urges. Yeah. And cross culturally, this is true, it appears, historically, of some cultures. However, for the vast majority of cultures, particularly that were important in the founding of America, this does not appear to have been true.

[00:01:00] And so what we are going to explore in this episode is what these cultures had to say about their own wife when they were trying to say, like, my wife is better than your wife about young men advice on who to date about what they found hot or attractive or they cheered on and songs and everything like that.

Only one of America's founding cultures. ever referenced the way a woman looked for the other cultures, basically never. And there's actually been some historical stuff looked at this, how attractive a woman was was not referenced was one culture. We'll get into the the Quaker culture in the Pennsylvania region.

So attractiveness is a sign of a bad wife. You wanted a wife who was playing. She was high class all these people are just gonna be stereotypes of what you expect, which is what I love so just like uh Preview here of the backwards people who you mentioned who are like super violent and make up the majority now of like trump's [00:02:00] face and i've always they really like tomboys.

So what did they have to say historically on notes of the state of virginia in? 1785 thomas jefferson observed that in the frontier regions, women were valued for being quote unquote robust and the ability to quote unquote bear fatigue. And Daniel Boone's own writings about his wife, Rebecca emphasized that quote, she could shoot as well as any man in quote, Oh, sweet.

I like that. Simon Kenton, a famous frontiersman wrote admiringly of Daniel Boone's wife, Rebecca quote. She could handle a rifle with the best of them and noted, quote, she could keep the farm and defend it too. That is an ideal woman. Yes, I agree. This, this, this thing you see was in the current frontiers of America, where you have the mud wrestling competition for women.

As we've, we've gone over in other episodes women fighting and showing martial ability is [00:03:00] goes back into American history, but we'll go into what the Puritans wanted and everything like that. But before I go into all of that, one thing I want to. Like really focus on is right now when people have kids the vast majority of kids that are had in the world Particularly in america are not had because of arousal patterns at all It is because a couple got together and decided they wanted kids

Speaker 2: And okay caveat because the the big drop in birth rates that we're seeing in places like latin america Result from basically impulsive teen sex, no longer resulting in babies because of increased birth control.

So I would say for like

Speaker: Everything here is that in every demographic of age range, fertility rates have increased or stayed stable except for under 24. You are right Meaning that

Speaker 2: like, I think the only time when people are having impulsive sex that produces babies, it's because They're insane, hormonally imbalanced teens, or maybe not imbalanced, but you know, like, hormonally revved up.

Speaker: [00:04:00] Their people with very low self control and very low IQ, and they're struggling to not get

Speaker 2: pregnant.

Speaker: Yeah, not myelinated,

Speaker 2: poor impulse control. Yeah, just like, should not be having babies. And honestly, it's not a bad thing. That they're not having babies like that's good

Speaker: And we'll get to this as we go into a lot of these quotes is the cultures that leaned into motivating fertility Through a lack of impulse control.

I. e through banning contraception through banning Pornography everything like that specifically, catholic and mormon culture are the cultures that are actually struggling uniquely was quickly falling fertility rates, whereas the cultures historically and and we'll see this if you look at the old puritan stuff, if you look at the old you know extreme protestant stuff they did not seem to care about sex or sexuality at all And I note that you actually have pretty big evolutionary differences between populations that we've noted The recent study showed, for example, belief in predestination is highly genetically [00:05:00] linked.

And people misunderstand how much of their culture is genetically linked or leans on genetics. An avid culture for generations since the founding of America has not used arousal to motivate childbirth. Of course, they are not going to be impacted by falling fertility rates as much as other cultures and really fascinating in a future episode.

We'll get to Catholics actually have a higher fertility rate when they are in other cultures that haven't genetically adopted to their techniques for increasing rate. i. e. if you're looking in Korea or China or Japan, Catholics will always outbreed Protestants. But if you look at cultures where these two religions are had within populations that have had these religious belief systems for generations, they underbreed Protestants.

That's

Speaker 2: very interesting.

Speaker: And even among the Catholics who have a lot of kids today and the Catholic communities that have a lot of kids today, what you'll see is they don't do it due to a lack of self control. They do it because of a desire to have a lot of kids.

So they have adapted and sort of made [00:06:00] it through this hurdle.

It's just up until the seventies the Catholic tradition really relied on this to keep the fertility rates high. As we can see from, well, the stereotypes of, The community and you'll see as we go through all these communities, they will fit the stereotypes you have of them.

Chris, it's important you learn about your Irish heritage.

Speaker: But let's go to the Puritans.

What were they looking for in a wife in their own words? Okay. Cotton Mather, Puritan minister, wrote in his 1710 work, A Christian at His Calling, that marriage's primary purpose was to raise up a godly seed and that physical relations should be approached with sobriety and moderation. [00:07:00]

Speaker 3: Okay.

Speaker: He told young men that they should seek wives that are industrious and prudent. If you look at his own diary entries about what he thought of his own wife, when he was looking for a second wife after being widowed, he wrote, quote, capacity for managing a household is what he was looking for. And her quote, excellence in discussing religious matters.

This was a woman who he had met, who he ended up. Marrying later. So he really appreciated her ability to have deep philosophical, religious conversations and her ability to manage the family finances. Which very

Speaker 2: useful. Yeah, I guess I'm very practically oriented.

Speaker: Yes, he noted among her chief accomplishments is she's accomplished in prudentials, meaning she was good at practical matters and decision making.

Speaker 2: Prudentials. I love that. Why is there not a section on the Collins Institute skill tree for prudentials?

Speaker: If you look at what he said about [00:08:00] his own wife after they were married, he said, quote, she wastes not her time in idleness or careless gabbing abroad, but is ever industrious in her. Proper business.

And that's how he was praising her not being like, oh, I got a hot wife here or whatever, right? William and we're going to go over lots of different cultures So we're not just going to go over the puritans. We're going to go over the southerners We're going to go over the backwoods people. We're going to yes William gouge an influential english protestant theologian wrote in his 1622 work of domestic duties That married couples engaged in physical relations With moderation, and primarily for the procreation of children, William Perkins, a prominent English Puritan theologian, wrote in Christian Economy, 1609, that the ideal wife should be selected for her, quote, godliness, faithfulness, and diligence in governing the family. He specifically advised young men to look for women who were, quote, skilled in household affairs, and, quote, [00:09:00] of good report for piety. John Cotton in his sermons and writings for Colonial Massachusetts emphasized that a potential life should be evaluated on grace and virtue, skill in household management, and devotion to God.

And If you look at the diary of Samuel Pepin's, the 17th century England, it contains numerous entries about what you should be looking for in a wife, family connections, financial management abilities, household skills, religious devotion, and educational background. Never mentions how they look. In the skillful physicians, and, and by the way, if you're like, well, no culture of this period cared about how they looked, you will actually see one culture, this is the southern culture in America, that frequently and primarily talked about how a woman looked.

Speaker 2: Well, now, okay, hold on. I'm, I'm pretty sure that even in these very practically oriented cultures, they still care about things like, I'm sure if a woman looked unkempt, it would be a sign of her lack of, Prudential skills, you know, so I'm sure they [00:10:00] looked at appearance and what if

Speaker: anything unkempt within the backwards people would have been seen as a edifying thing.

It would have been seen as a and we'll get to instances of this. So certainly

Speaker 2: not among the Puritans. So, I mean, it would suggest low

Speaker: conscientiousness. Right, among the Puritans it would, but the point I'm making is physical appearance in a historic context, if you are an American at least, was not what your ancestors used to motivate reproduction.

Speaker 2: And to attempt They were not looking to date hot Brazilian models. Sorry, viewers. Sorry,

Speaker: yes. Not to burst your bubbles! To motivate fertility you have already lost the entire game. Unless you're trying to create an entirely new culture that values attractiveness and arousal And if so, I would say why like if that's not your historic culture Why are you trying to recultivate that when the cultures that used to thrive through that like because castle culture, for example and here I'm [00:11:00] not talking about high Catholic culture.

I'm talking about like low or poor Catholic culture. If you're talking about like immigrants from Ireland and stuff like that, you see descriptions of this a lot. They have the successful iterations of their culture have completely moved away from that to caring about kids and really having a disinterest in sex and sexuality.

For the vast majority of high fertility cultures within the U. S. and around the world today, having kids is only sexy or arousing if you are really into scheduling.

Which, okay, given the nerdiness of our audience, might be more of you than would be representative within the general public. Great, let's all figure out when I can have sex. Okay, what if Jenna did her DVD commentary while she was getting bejazzled? You know what? We have to look at the whole month.

Ooh, yeah. There it is. I need to cross reference this with my menstruations. I'm gonna have to color code all of this. [00:12:00] Oh yeah, that's nice. This is, um It's getting hot in here, right? If I had a column for my basal body temperature, then I could schedule a round peak ovulation.

Oh God, this whole thing could be a spreadsheet. If we print it in Landscape,

Speaker: The skillful physician actually came up in a lot of these. It was written in 1659 in a popular marriage manual.

Speaker 2: Oh, ooh, okay.

Speaker: And it listed a number of qualities of a good wife, knowledge of scripture, ability to manage servants, skill in household economy, and women have been managing, managing the household wealth for a long time.

Managing household money and stuff like that, many people are like, oh, you let your wife manage the house and the money of the house and everything like that? I'm like, yes, of course, this is like very traditional. At least for my people good reputation in the community and temperance in behavior were the things that were cared about quote, it said, Oh yeah, and I [00:13:00] guess

Speaker 2: if we're talking about the hot crazy graph, they therefore probably not the sexiest women.

Speaker: No, they, they're at the bottom of the hot crazy graph. If they

Speaker 2: have even temperament, they've got to be pretty damn frumpy.

Speaker: Yeah. Can oversee her house, direct her servants, and with her hands, if need requires, do any housewifery. So it's about her own skill as well. Housewifery.

Speaker 3: Housewifery.

Speaker: Now, John Adams, when he was talking to his wife, you know, notable Puritan from early American, really important to the foundation of our country.

So we can see But also Abigail Adams,

Speaker 2: let's just be clear, was like an intellectual in her own right. A huge advisor in his own career. Also like not Not just a, she's, she wouldn't be a tradwife influencer. He would be like, she would have a substack, she would have her own following,

Speaker: if you will. Yeah, so he wrote about her to his friends, and when he wrote about her, he would constantly emphasize her intelligence.

And her character and he noted to a friend that she was a scholar and possessed a [00:14:00] mind that might have adorned a court he particularly praised her knowledge of literature and her ability to engage in intellectual discourse So what you'll see repeatedly here is its ability at intellectual debate on the topics that matter to these individuals either literature or religion That was the primary thing that edified a wife and her ability to manage finances and her industry very different to what people are bragging about today.

In Samuel Seward's diary, 1652 1730, it contains multiple entries about potential wives, where he evaluates them almost entirely on practical and spiritual grounds. In one notable entry about a potential match, he writes admiring of how she, quote, keeps excellent order in her family, end quote, and, quote, shows wisdom in the management of affairs, end quote.

He spends several paragraphs discussing her religious knowledge and household management skills without a single mention of her physical appearance. These people did not ruminate about this, and they did not think [00:15:00] about this, and actually if you look at them talking about what they were looking forward to on their wedding night, because you find this in some of the old Protestant intellectuals, they'll be like, Me and my wife will sit together by the bedside, and we will spend all night praying and having an intellectual conversation about God.

And like, they were not And what we need to understand here is different cultures have different motivation towards arousal and towards sexuality, and some cultures, when they didn't need this motivation, it became merely bred out of them to motivate reproduction. And I think that's part of what we're seeing here

to be more pointed, the core theme of the argument in this piece is that arousal and sexuality have been largely vestigial in humans for hundreds of years.

And thus attempting to use it to motivate fertility within a population is going to have about the same results as using your appendix to try to clean your blood supply [00:16:00] instead of your kidney.

Speaker: because you'll note that they didn't even talk about this in passing, and we'll get to this in a bit, because it's actually really interesting if you, like, analyze their writings more over.

They'll, they'll be very explicit in their sexual conversations, but they actually very similar to this channel where we will have very explicit conversations about the furries or about people who are into like the Omega verse or about like abnormal human sexuality, but we are like an anti horny channel.

You could almost say like, we don't, you don't like put on the horniness to get viewers. I don't. We're literally a husband and wife sitting in separate

Speaker 2: rooms.

Speaker: Yeah, we have no restrictions against talking about sexuality. And this is mentioned in Albion Seed, that the Puritan community of this period, they wrote about sexuality so explicitly that many of their works had to be censored to the 20th century.

But they didn't write about it with horniness, it was just practicality. Okay, so. Ralph Jocelyn, an English vicar, wrote in his diary about potential [00:17:00] matches for his children, consistently focusing on qualities like good housewifery, godly conversation, and prudent dealing. Now this is, this is what I was mentioning before.

The historical record suggests descriptions of women's physical appearance were actually relatively uncommon in formal writing and documents from Puritan and early Protestant periods. If you look at Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter, 1998, they analyzed letters and diaries from the 18th century and found that while physical appearance was sometimes written, it was far less prominent in the discussion of character, accomplishment, or domestic abilities when discussing potential marriages.

David Hackley Fisher in LBMC noted that Puritan writing about courtship and marriage Tend to focus heavily on spiritual and practical qualities rather than physical attraction. The historical record suggests descriptions of women's physical appearance were actually relatively uncommon in formal writing and documents from the Puritan and early Protestant periods, which I find really, [00:18:00] really fascinating.

Now, if you're like, okay, so what were they looking for? Thomas Gadker, A Good Wife God's Gift. This was written in 1720 about what you should look for in wives or what good wives do. I mean,

Speaker 2: there weren't a lot of books around back then. How many written guides there actually are for like finding a wife?

Instead of just, I imagine that this was just going to be orally passed down folk wisdom, but you're quoting books. That's really surprising.

Speaker: Only the Puritans are we quoting books, this is what I'll say, okay? Everyone else didn't, didn't with the Faustus quoting letters with the, with the Backwoods people, it's songs.

You know, so yeah, people wrote in different ways. But the Puritans liked their writing, okay? So a good wife, God's gift, 1620, he said that good wives were early risers, good work women and we're not idle, but occupied with honest labor. Look well to the ways of her household. So, really, industry, ability at conversation, specifically intellectual [00:19:00] conversation with the husband, and this is just repeatedly brought back to it.

All these things. It's not like one guy had like a fetish for this. Nobody talked about how their wives looked. They did not care. They did not anticipate sex on their wedding night. They saw it as kind of gross and something that you needed to bear through to have kids. John Robinson, a Puritan pastor, wrote, The most praiseworthy quality of a wife was painful and diligent in her place.

Painful meant hardworking and industrious in the language of the time. I, I love that. So now we're going to talk about the Quakers, which were the most similar to the Puritans and what they told people they wanted, but they were really anti talking about sexuality. So in the way that like our show, like does not care about talking about sex or sexuality, we're just not horny about it.

They were like terrified of sexuality. So William Penn, in advice to his children, emphasized that a good marriage match should be based on the things that are of God, rather than worldly attributes. He specifically advised somebody looking for plainness [00:20:00] in a wife, meaning simplicity and authenticity.

And And the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting records from 1700's show that when marriages were being approved, so they needed to be approved they focused on the couple's commitment to Quaker principles, their clearness from other relationships, their ability to support themselves through honest manual labor, and their plain way of living.

You had to be extra plain. In John Willman's journal, Mid 1700s, he wrote about marriage in terms of spiritual compatibility and shared commitment to Quaker values. When describing his own marriage to Sarah Ellis, he focused entirely on her, quote, grave and modest deportment.

I love this. She had a very grave deportment, so you know she's a high quality woman. Not like her butt's nice or anything like that. This woman, let me tell you. She

Speaker 2: sounds like the, like, joke comedy skit version of a Puritan woman.

Speaker: Yes, a very, but this was Quakers, okay? So keep in mind, the Quakers are the ones who are all about, like, grave and honest, everything like that.

They wanted [00:21:00] honest, plainness, the Puritans wanted industry and intellectual conversation. So very different here, actually. They're sort of similar, but very different. He wanted a woman who was esteemed as a dutiful daughter, a careful and loving sister. Which is, is, is really, really interesting. Is that the, the Quakers wanted plainness, they wanted simplicity, they wanted a level of graveness.

All of this was like socially edifying for them. Whereas the Puritans were much more interested in their personal relation with the wife and how the wife would contribute to their income. Basically, I want her to be good with finances, good with work around the house, good at managing the servants. I want her to be able to have good intellectual conversations.

And this is one of the cultures that Simone and I are, are descended from. And, and the other culture we're descended from is the backwoods culture, which I'll get to right here. So we, know that Thomas Efferson said that he, he wanted them to be, they were robust. And had a to bear fatigue.

That's what they were judged on. Primarily. [00:22:00] And as we mentioned with Daniel Boone, he said of his wife, she could shoot as well as any man. As I mentioned, martial prowess. It was really important in these cultures. This is ability to defend themselves ability to defend the homestead. Because as I was told growing up is, you know, one of the descendants of part of this culture is weak women make weak sons.

And this is very different from the way the southern culture saw this, which we'll get to in a second. This was a greater Appalachian cultural group or the backwards cultural group of America. And so early American folk songs and stories from the frontier regions praise women for being strong enough to help with field work, capable of defending the homestead, able to bear children under harsh conditions and skilled at practical tasks like spinning, weaving and preserving food.

And as you saw from the book we read about my grandfather, he talked about this. He said that my mother could make a meal that a, a skilled chemist could not improve upon and that she could spin, you know, is the best of them and very interested in like My mom could do better wifing tasks than the best scientists and [00:23:00] industrialists of our era could do.

And as I mentioned, you know, Sam Kenton, he said of Daniel Boone's wife that she could keep the farm and defend it and handle a rifle with the best of them. But we actually see this in other areas. So In several accounts in the Draper Manuscripts, a collection of frontier histories and interviews, they mention women as being particularly valued for ability to man a defensive position during raids, process game and preserve meat, handle firearms competently, manage livestock independently.

And so this is why I think when you look about like the descendants of the greater Appalachian culture. While you see, like, the noodling girl and stuff like that, this is a girl who catches a giant catfish, but you see the women hunters as this esteemed group that you're supposed to, like, oh, this, this is what the perfect wife is.

It's a woman in camo who knows how to shoot, who knows how to defend her property. Very different from what you would think of the old Southern value, which is, like, the female aristocrat of the Deep South.

Speaker 2: Yes, although I think that these standards also, and even our [00:24:00] standards for partners now, are a big reflection of the society that surrounds them.

I mean, what you see here, Are indications that these are people living in a society with low I guess low trust or high levels of violence or what is it called? Like vigilante justice, you know, people are expecting. I literally

Speaker: do not disagree more with what you're saying right now.

Speaker 2: Well, I mean, while.

If you

Speaker: encounter examples across

Speaker 2: the board. Also, society, hold on. In which people are expected to process their own food. So this is like a low industrialized society. Versus like areas that were more, we'll say in like, early proto industrialized, where women were more expected to be able to like, manage accounts well, manage their finances.

Let's completely

Speaker: display your argument with historical and modern examples. So, as a modern example, we can look at many societies that are low trust, very violent, very clannish, like the Middle East where women are expected to shut up, do what they're told, and are [00:25:00] definitely not valued for their ability to fight, use guns, beat up other women to

Speaker 2: their surrounding societies.

But I still think that the standards of an ideal partner reflect their surrounding society. Well, and I'm pointing out that this isn't

Speaker: true. So if you look in modern context which is the descendants of the greater Appalachian cultural group where we have pointed out before that they have less selling context for Competitions for women, where women are very clearly being, this is not about like Degrading them or something.

This is men being like the woman who can beat up the other woman in a mud wrestling competition. And you see these women are not holding back. Like in one of the videos that I posted before, one of the women looks like she's holding back a little. And the other woman just goes at it and slams her and.

The audience loves this.

Speaker 36: Yeah! Oh! Oh! Yeah, man! We've been so ready! Oh, hang on, he's, he's got a pin somewhere! Woo! [00:26:00] Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! We're gonna give that a count. We got

Speaker 38: kickoff? Yeah!

Speaker 36: Woo!

Speaker 38: Woo! Yeah! Woo! Oh! She's up! She's good! She wants out! She wants out! Give up! No! We're gonna go

yeah! Woo! Nicely done!

Speaker: This is a modern context. The, the, the TV shows that these people grew up with, the radio stations, these people grew up with the news. They grew up with none of them lauded this. This is completely due to either genetic selection for these forms of preferences or a cultural memory that goes back generations in terms of what a good wife is and you saying, Oh, it's just what's around them.

This is like. factually untrue. Otherwise, what we would see is in the low trust Islamic out there regions right now where like ISIS is, they'd be like, oh, we want a woman who can fight, which is [00:27:00] not what they want because they aren't a truly martial culture. They are a culture that is a sort of ordered form of martialism, which we talk about in other videos.

You can see this in our other videos on this. But yeah, that's not true. Do you want to, do you have a counter argument to that or?

Speaker 2: I just don't find your argument to be very compelling. And I think that when you look at each of these cultures. And you see the amenities of people who control their lives.

Explain, if you don't find

Speaker: it compelling, explain how the Appalachian Cultural Group maintained this value without containing control of their media environment.

Speaker 2: What do you mean control of their media environment?

Speaker: They don't, so Appalachian Cultural Group, for generations, first, basically hasn't written books.

They don't produce movies. They don't produce any, any form of like, so when their kids are growing up and they're trying to normalize to what's culturally normal, they are reading books that are produced by whether it's Puritans during the past, or by modern modern. I think that's more of an argument

Speaker 2: in my favor.

That's an argument that. You grew up to respect the [00:28:00] fact that your mother can defend your home with a gun and that your mother can process meat because you are living, you're much more likely to be living on a farm in a highly rural area without a butcher in town. I wasn't

Speaker: living on a farm in a highly rural area and I still grew up respecting all of that.

All of this is about cultural transmission and not about the context of their daily life.

Speaker 2: I hear that and I think that there is. Some inherited interplay like we are realizing more and more with our kids that a lot of what We thought were just quirks of our personality are probably genetic. Just like how insistently are you interested in things?

Speaker: Attraction profile, preference for a wife, everything like that is genetic and that it needs to be paired with a culture that works with. Yeah, but I

Speaker 2: think that these are downstream of selective pressures, which were produced by their surroundings in society.

Speaker: Yeah, obviously all selective pressures are produced for their society.

But the point I'm making is [00:29:00] these things persist generations, like a hundred years after the selective pressures existed. That's not that

Speaker 2: many generations, Malcolm.

Speaker: That's a long time if you're talking about American history.

Speaker 2: Yeah, but not if you're talking about the number of ancestors. I understand if you're talking

Speaker: about the number of ancestors, but what you're acting like is that groups just basically cave to the surrounding cultural pressures when that's like objectively not true.

Speaker 2: No, but they

Speaker: also,

Speaker 2: keep in mind, they also select for similar cultural pressures. So, your family kept just migrating out to like new frontiers and trying to build their own new civilizations going out to Texas. My family made their way to California and, and tried to, like, you know, go out to the frontier there and rebuild San Francisco after it burned down in 1908.

So, like, again, like, these things have an interplay, and I think you're much more likely to find someone of Scots Irish descent who maintains those cultural values if their family continued to [00:30:00] lean into the environments that also leaned into the selective pressures that support those values.

Speaker: Yes, you're definitely going to find that, which means you need to pay attention to that and how you choose your family environment.

But I think the point you were trying to make earlier is a lot of this is just cultural and it's not. It's, it's, it's, it's cultural like, like modern pop cultural. I wasn't saying

Speaker 2: it was cultural. I was saying it was a product of their surrounding society. That, for example, in Puritan, in the Puritan colonies.

People needed devout, conscientious, sober wives because this was a highly religious settlement in which people lived in tight knit communities in which people played different roles. And you needed people who were very like, who played the right role within their communities.

Speaker: I really disagree with this.

All the stuff that you're talking about right now was an intentional cultural choice of the Puritans when they moved into these environments, which differentiated from the [00:31:00] cultural choices that led to the genetics that led to things like the Quakers or the Southerners or the Appalachians. And if you look at again, I disagree.

So you

Speaker 2: haven't even gotten to the Southerner criteria, but you know, this was. What we're talking about is the second sons of the UK immigrating and trying to make their fortune. These are people who came with wealth, they owned land, so they went for ornamental lives. And this is a product of the resources in their surroundings.

Speaker: Everything, so not just their mental profiles, but I think their physical genetic profiles. If you look at Quaker women it seems pretty obvious to me that they were selected by plainness. Like, no shade on, like, the Quaker community but this is a community that intergenerationally selected for plainness.

If you look at the Puritan community, you see, like, if you look at you, for example, Simone your physical appearance, you do not look that different from the Puritans that you would have seen in art back in the day. And I [00:32:00] can put art on the screen here, people can see you look. A lot like them in your physical facial features, which are really focused on one like intellectual conversational ability.

This is something that you were clearly selected for and industriousness and looking industrious. Like you have a face that looks like a wife. Who's going to do a lot of work and not put up a fight. But like I look at you, I'm like, Oh, this is a woman who looks financially sound and industrious, more than a rousing in a traditional sense.

If you look at what happened to the southern women, they became very ornamental in their looks. These women are the most traditionally attractive within the United States. I don't think most people would argue that. And if you look at the Appalachian women, they became very robust. Compared to the other women.

And if you like tomboys, you're going to like the women that are produced by this culture. And so I think that we also see this sort of etched into the characters. And this is something that we try to ignore because everyone's focused on, like, ethnic differences instead of, like, [00:33:00] interracial differences where we select it into these cultures.

And that, for example, if a woman looked like Simone, looked, like, industrious and prudent and, and intellectual she would be if she was born into a different culture, suppose she was born into the abolition culture and my family lived alongside that cultures that were like part descended from that culture you would have been selected into our family.

Right, like really early on in that cultural period or if you were born to a quaker family You might have found a higher quality husband within a purity family Because and this is how you get these sort of genetic vortexes that happen really quickly culturally that can end up mattering a lot more And the ethnic cultural vortexes that everyone's so focused on.

But if we go back to what were the backwoods people looking for, okay? So, William Byrd II, while not strictly a frontierman, wrote in his journals about backcountry women he encountered, noting with approval how they could ride a stride and handle An axe as well as a needle. So these are things that they [00:34:00] were seen as good about them.

Can they handle an axe as well as a needle? What was really interesting is Mary Ingalls who escaped native american captivity was often praised in contemporary accounts for her Not for her appearance, but for her quote Extraordinary constitution and ability to survive in extreme conditions So to be captured and to fight back about your capturers.

Remember I mentioned that like How do you choose a good wife? Who gets in a good position during a raid? Who can escape Native American captivity? This is not what the other cultural groups are interested in, but martial prowess was the number one thing that they were looking for. Toughness in a wife.

A bearish fatigue, as he said. So contemporary accounts of Betty Zane, who became a frontier hero for carrying a gunpowder during the siege of Fort Henry in 1782, were widely shared as retold,, so this is a woman who is being praised within these cultures. If you look at more modern iterations of women, you know, you don't just have the mud relish the lilies of today.

You don't just have the, the noodler women of today.

Speaker 29: That was [00:35:00] good. Woohoo! That's a good one. There we go.

Speaker: You have individuals like Annie Oakley, who secured her husband by beating him in a duel, and by Butler's own accounts, when he talked about what he liked about Annie Oakley, he emphasized her shooting and her practical skills, saying, quote, I fell in love with her courage and determination not, you know, what she looked like or anything like that.

Any any thoughts about the Backwoods people before we go to the Southerners here?

Speaker 2: I'm still just seeing the products of selective pressures of an environment, but carry on.

Speaker: Selective pressures were a selected environment, so it doesn't make any difference. No,

Speaker 2: they, I mean, okay, the Scots Irish did not Choose to go to the backwoods.

They were kind of forced in there by the quakers who were like get the hell out of here You are that's not really true. They came over on like the Okay, let's talk about

Speaker: where every group chose to [00:36:00] immigrate to because you are being just intent like I don't know. Do you not remember? Like the The

Speaker 2: cold and rocky ground of New England.

Speaker: They specifically chose settlements that were very rocky because they were harder to plow because they wanted to emphasize industriousness in their daily life. I feel like

Speaker 2: that's apocryphal. It seems It's kind of weird. I mean, there was no, no, no, no.

Speaker: Why did the Backwoods people move to the areas where there were constant Klan conflicts?

Speaker 2: Well, there were constant Klan conflicts among them, even in Scotland. Because they were

Speaker: moving from areas where there were constant Klan conflicts. They created the nature of the environment. The Appalachian Mountain area wasn't hostile because it was an innately hostile area or the Native Americans there were more hostile than other Native Americans.

And why? They weren't. No, they weren't. They were hostile because the Backwoods people were there fighting with the Native [00:37:00] Americans and fighting with each other. If you look at the pre area, the Native Americans in the Appalachian region were not more hostile before the Backwoods people got there than any of the other Native American communities.

Yes, the Backwoods people did act as a buffer zone that the Quakers sort of laid out in that region, but the Backwoods people also intentionally sorted into this region. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Well, anyway, carry on.

Speaker: No, but it's important to note. As you mentioned, we're like, if a woman was disproportionately you know, like, attractive to one of these groups, or had attitudes that was disproportionately attractive to one of these groups, she was likely to marry into them, which leads to this vortex.

But also, if an individual is born to a Quaker group and they are more martial, they are more interested in being rowdy and fighting and you know, Maybe like girls who are rowdy and fighting and everything like that. They're going to move out of that community and into the backwoods. If a Puritan was born that way, he's going to [00:38:00] move out of that community and into the backwoods.

If a Quaker was born less like focused on their status, less focused on how other people saw them and was more interested in intellectualism for intellectualism's own sake, they're going to move to the Puritan community. They're interested in being an ornamental wife. They're going to move to the Deep South's community.

This is the way these things work and create I feel like

Speaker 2: you're overstating the social mobility of that time.

Speaker: You don't need to overstate the social mobility because all of these groups lived adjacent to each other. So even if you don't have pure social mobility, you're going to have a degree of genetic social osmosis, which is going to strengthen every one of these groups within these regions.

And if you're talking about, like, the Southern You're like, oh, it's just an accident that the aristocrats from England moved to the part of the United States where slave cropping worked. The people who had never worked a day in their lives wanted to move and create a culture where they didn't have to work a day in their lives.

No, that wasn't an accident. That [00:39:00] literally was how they the original descendants of the Cavaliers. They weren't one of these other groups and that's the way they wanted to live their lives. What you're missing is you're looking at like the Backwoods region or you're looking at the Puritan region and you're saying that these regions motivated these cultural traits when in reality, it's the exact opposite.

Cultural traits motivated the groups that settled in these regions, not the other way around. When the original descendants of the Cavaliers. We're looking for a place to set up within the United States. They had colonies in the northeast as well Remember, they thought they could like find gold there and stuff but they didn't end up staying in those regions because they weren't able to build an easy life for themselves Which is what they wanted an easy life based on slaves or whatever else.

Speaker 2: So you're over You're also so new england was good for like small scale agriculture, which is exactly what these small puritan communities wanted Whereas what the [00:40:00] Cavaliers were going for was like large scale industrial farming, which the South was good for.

Speaker: Exactly, but the point I'm making is that their culture was not downstream of their environment.

Their environment was downstream of their culture. And you are implying that the environmental conditions shape the culture instead of the opposite, which is what really happened. And that better explains that cultures are actually much more durable, both genetically and intergenerationally, in terms of how you should find a wife, or how you should think about wives, or anything like that, than you would think.

And if you're growing up in a modern context, and you are attempting to Slap whatever you think of as generic masculinity onto a genetic cultural framework that wasn't built for that. You are going to fail. This is why and we'll do another episode on this in the future. In East Asia, Christians, despite their high fertility rate in other communities, actually have a lower average fertility rate than Buddhists in these [00:41:00] communities.

What? Why? It's because they haven't. Genetically work together for many generations, and they don't mesh. Well, you have everything from how you find a wife to what you find attractive to what you like in a partner to what you want to do is your white life to how you want to handle your business or start a business.

All of this is a genetic cultural pool that you need to take into account when you're thinking about this. And this idea of, oh, just ban porn or just ban contraception is so pig headed and wrong if you're looking at like actual American history, which is the point of making it. Okay. So if we're going to the deep South, what did they care about?

As she, you know, we've been talking about. So, Landon Carter's diary includes entries about potential matches for his children, where he discussed things like breeding, genteel manners and he noted one woman's , graceful carriage, and how she was well taught in the accomplishment.

Proper to her station Robert Carter, also known as King Carter of Virginia, wrote letters [00:42:00] about potential matches for his children that emphasize the importance of quote unquote good breeding and being from the better sort. In one of his letters discussing potential marriage, he noted approvingly that the young lady was quote unquote well bred and dances was exceeding grace.

Lucy Pike Brid was described in contemporary accounts of having quote, beauty and accomplishments. And that made her a desirable match. Her marriage negotiations, as recorded in various letters, emphasized her education in, quote, refined arts and her ability to manage a grand household in the proper style.

The, and you'll note here, so these women were lauded for something very different from the other women. It was when they care about their education. So when the Puritans talked about education, what are they always talking about? How good of a conversational partner? Was she able to engage me in in depth religious discussion or literature discussion?

Where in the South, it's, does she have knowledge of the refined arts? Like, is she able to signal her class status well? Is she of [00:43:00] the better sort? Is she beautiful? Can she dance gracefully? Very, very, very different sort of a thing to look for in a breeding partner. The Southern Cavalier culture presented a notable contrast with Puritan and Frontier attitudes.

In Cavalier culture, such as the American South, particularly among the planter class, there was much more emphasis on physical beauty, refinement, and social graces in describing potential wives. William Berks II's diaries in early 18th century Virginia provide a good example of this. Unlike His description's a backcountry woman.

When writing about potential matches in his own social class, he frequently mentioned the women's appearance, dancing ability, and social graces. He described one potential match as having, quote, a very good shape and a great deal of wit, end quote. Philip Vickens Philanthropy, a tutor in Virginia in the 1770s, wrote detailed observations of how young women in planter society were evaluated.

His journals note how young ladies were praised for their grace in dancing, beauty in department, skill in music [00:44:00] and entertainment, ability to manage social occasions, and accomplishments, where accomplishments were designed as things like French music and drawing. The diary of Colonel Landon Carter, a prominent Virginia planter has numerous appearances to ladies appearance and social graces that you would never find in, in Puritan or Quaker or even backwoods culture.

Which I find really interesting. And I think that as we think about how can we motivate high fertility within our own society, it's really important to note that within American culture, at least historically, high fertility, Both in a modern context and in a historic context was almost never motivated by arousal.

Speaker 3: Hmm.

Speaker 2: Yeah, there's, I mean, okay, you've demonstrated that across cultures, there are very, very different criteria. But none of these are like, how hot is she? It may be How much can she signal that she came from landed gentry, or how much can she signal Yeah,

Speaker: and the [00:45:00] one culture that cares about hotness, the southern culture

Speaker 2: That's not even hotness.

That's not even hotness. There was, I mean, it was about good posture, but that is a reflection It's about, like, beauty and class, yeah. Yeah, it's a reflection of investment in costly signaling that is a sign of wealth. So yeah, even, even the culture that we would argue is the most aesthetically oriented, it doesn't even have to do with being Attractive.

So that's really interesting.

Speaker: And I think that it leads to people to make massive mistakes in how they're treating this situation. Is that humanity, most of humanity, decoupled arousal from the number of kids you have centuries ago. Millennia ago. And yet Men today are like, how are you going to motivate sex if you have access to pornography or if you have another way to like

Speaker 2: this was, this was never the issue.

This was never the issue.

Speaker: Exactly. And I, and I also wonder if maybe these groups are less susceptible to [00:46:00] pornography. So one of the things I've noticed about groups, I've mentioned this. That are because one thing we've noted in previous episodes is that you really only see problems with pornography addiction in individuals who attempt to, like, keep pornography away from themselves or, like, regulate the ways that they interact with pornography, and I've been like, well, I've been really dismissive of it, but I've also noted that within Puritan culture, there is a note that as the culture began to degrade, really.

And culture that was really teetotaling, like really anti alcohol then became some of the most alcoholic culture there was. And I know it's a classic thing about Baptists, primitive Baptists, which is a type of Calvinist. The, the line from where I grew up is like, Jews deny Christ. Catholics deny.

I can't remember something offensive and Baptist deny knowing each other at the liquor store. It was the idea being that the drinking a lot is really common in this cultural group, but it's really common in both of our families. And we've had a couple generations to basically come to terms with this.

So we, we can handle it [00:47:00] now. Whereas. To an extent. I mean, I still take naltrexone to handle it. If I look at the cultures that may be struggling the most with spornography, they may be groups that had historic bans against stuff like this and motivated reproduction through fertility, like Mormon communities, which is where you hear about the most problems with porn addiction and stuff like that.

So it might just be that they don't have a genetic resistance to it that would have been built up by other communities.

Speaker 2: Hmm. That's plausible. Yeah.

Speaker: One of the things you said to me is you were like, look, once you're married and an adult, like basically nobody over 35 is having kids. Not even over 35.

Nobody I'd say over 28 is having kids because of arousal issues.

Speaker 2: Oh yeah. Yeah. Because of. Impulse control around sex. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I guess the one exception where we, I feel like we still see this taking place is with Mormons because they can't have sex outside of marriage and they are encouraged to get married really young and many do like expedite marriage [00:48:00] because

Speaker 3: they're

Speaker 2: kind of eager.

And then they do have, I mean, at least historically they've had better birth rates. I feel like things are kind of falling apart there, but that's the only example I can really think of where sex drive is playing a factor in fertility.

Speaker: When we talk about, you know, culturally or genetically, like, some individuals have been like, oh, you guys are really gross in that you create your children outside of Of the mom and dad having sex, right?

Because we use IVF, we use genetic selection, stuff like that. And I'm, and I'm like, oh my god, I like, I have the exact opposite inclination, which is what is grosser than knowing that I'm a product of my mom and dad having sex. Yeah,

Speaker 2: seriously. Come on, guys. It seems really

Speaker: disgusting. And then you read these ancient Puritan writings, where they're like, Sex should only be engaged in with moderation and only to produce children.

It was clear that these were not individuals who, they would have had [00:49:00] a, a more I'd say, temperate reaction to, like, gleeously enjoying sexuality. Which some groups have attempted to do to increase Where I see a lot of you, you, you see this in like, for example, some Jewish groups where they're like trying to make sexuality like fine and, and, and like enjoyable.

And they're like, oh yes, you really need to take joy when it's like these classic Puritans. They were like, no, like sex is a duty. Like schedule it. Okay, do what you have to do. The point is kids you can really always hear them sort of sighing under their breath. It's like I know and I think that if we deny These differences or specializations around having kids we're gonna have a huge time motivating Increasing fertility rate within people of different predilections, and if you don't know who your ancestors were, you should at least be able to search yourself for your own predilections and understand that maybe you are not a good candidate [00:50:00] to motivate having lots of kids because you don't have access to any other way to get off.

Or maybe you are not a good candidate for any other way. Maybe you would only have a lot of kids if you were young and reckless and had all other means of getting off denied to you. And I think it's this degree of self knowledge, which is really important that is sort of erased today because of this belief of Blake Slade ism and all humans are the same.

When we're not.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker: Anyways, love you to the next one. We can go to the next episode on Chinese people being the new Jews.

Speaker 2: Thank you for keeping me entertained, Malcolm. That that is, that is your duty as a husband. Do I

Speaker: entertain you as a husband? I am entertained.

Speaker 2: I am entertained. I will let you live another night in this house.

Yeah. Final thoughts. Just, yeah, I totally agree with you. Once again, we are highly disappointed by people who think that somehow it makes sense to ban [00:51:00] porn and ban condoms and all this other nonsense. If you want to lose our respect for your intellectual capabilities really quickly. Just come up to us and be like, why don't we just ban condoms?

Speaker: Well, I think that this works within communities that historically use this to motivate high fertility But you need to be strict in how you do it and you can't use the government as we pointed out For example, catholic communities when they are minorities in other countries have a much higher fertility rate than when they're the majority within their country

Speaker 2: Yeah, tend to your own flock.

You've got to have that internal strong community And if you don't have that then yeah, when you when you outsource it to your government all that internal strength Just goes away. It's no good.

Speaker: By the way, if you're wondering why we're not mentioning early American Catholics, because they basically didn't exist.

They were like 1. 2 percent of the American population. It might be like 1. 5 percent at the time of the revolution. People were like, what about Maryland? That was a Catholic colony. No, Maryland was only around 10 percent Catholic. Catholics basically didn't exist until the Irish and Italian immigrant waves.

The Great Replacement already happened. See [00:52:00] our episode on that. Love you today, Simone.

Speaker 2: Love you too, Malcolm. You already have the other link, so I'll just see you in there.

Speaker: So on Reddit, they were before the Super Bowl, they were like, Oh, Trump's going to get booed at the Super Bowl. It's going to be awful. I predict this is like the top post on Reddit. Then gets cheered by everyone. Taylor Swift gets booed. What? Wait, why did Taylor Swift get booed? I think just because she's so Even like normie was the person that

Speaker 2: she's dating was he on the team that lost so

Speaker: The people were not, you know excited

Speaker 3: I

Speaker 2: loved octavian's commentary on The super bowl. What do you have to say? Well, I have video of it. He refers to it as soccer. He told me that you know, the eagles should win That they're great. And that the other team, maybe he called it the red team. He kept saying, we don't know what they're doing.

We don't know what they're doing. [00:53:00] We don't know what they're doing. I'm like, well, what, what is their mascot? What are they? And he's like, I don't know. It was, it was really sweet. Remember when he came home, like literally wearing an Eagle's hat. I don't remember ever in my public school, there being discussion.

Of sports.

Speaker: So I grew up in Dallas and this is when the Cowboys like won the Super Bowl or whatever it's called. Did they do the Super Bowl? Anyway, yeah, they everyone would always be like, oh, what do you think of them? Cowboys when I like travel to other places. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. They're good.

Whatever

Speaker 2: happened to the Dallas. Oh, you know what? Now I feel like the Dallas Cowboys are actually more famous for their cheerleaders than they are for. They were famous for their

Speaker: cheerleaders when I was a kid, Simone. Yeah, their cheerleaders are in,

Simone Collins: yeah, but there was recently a Netflix documentary about them.

So then that's what people think.