Massive brawl erupts in Bangkok between Thai and Filipino ladyboys.
Where I discuss male intrasexual competition, why the distinction between sex and gender is important, ENORMOUS testicles, and Shakespeare.
Many English-speaking news agencies are calling this a “transgender” brawl, but it is important to say that the vast majority of ladyboys and third-gender individuals in Thailand and the Philippines do not identify as “trans”. They are men, mostly feminine gay men. They do not identify as women. The woke scramble to conflate ladyboys with Western transwomen is largely fallacious. It sucks. To redefine them as “transgender” could even be seen as an act of Western transgender cultural imperialism. Take that progressives!
So it would be scientifically accurate to look at this through the evolutionary psychology lens of male intrasexual competition rather than my usual beat of female intrasexual competition (FIC). I am often criticised for focusing too much on FIC. Women in general and feminists in particular get very defensive about FIC. They don’t like to acknowledge that it exists, and if they do they attribute it to “patriarchy” - men turning women against one another, divide and concur, etc. This is ludicrous, of course. One sex cannot be understood except in the light of the other. Men and women have co-evolved, each shaping the other both physically and psychologically via sexual selection and competition within a sex is always far more intense than without. Female intrasexual competition is the pink elephant in the feminist room. So, to my critics I put two explanations forward for this which I hope satisfies them:
FIC is one of my areas of expertise. I was mentored by one of the pioneers of the theory, Professor Anne Campbell, who sadly passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2017 just before she was about to retire. In one of her last emails to me, she wrote, “It’s up to you now.” Anne was kinder to me than my own mother had been. I took her passing of the baton to me seriously. I also take it as part of my responsibility not to let her name be erased from the popular writing record as the concept of FIC becomes more well-known amongst new media writers. This is something that has bothered me a lot over the last year or two. New media, as opposed to legacy media, is massively cliquish1. Those in one clique almost exclusively cite only other “friends” inside the clique. It bothers me when I see someone using Anne’s (and other womens’) pioneering work and failing to even mention her name. This is usually because they learned about FIC from their friends within the clique who, if they learned about FIC outside of the clique, don’t mention where because to do so would be citing a rival. How’s that for manifest female intrasexual competition, a strategy that Western men also appear to be using more and more? This leads me to a serious question: What's the point of calling mainstream media and academia not fit for purpose, captured and woke if its new media replacement has no ethics about plagiarism? We live in a new age of “truth-seeking” on the internet and need to update these terms accordingly. People “borrowing from” a 50-year-old still pioneering idea from an academic and posting it on the internet as their new hot take for reputational and/or fiscal gain, arguably is plagiarism. You shouldn’t have to like someone to do the right thing. But that’s for another article.
We have had thousands of years — the entirety of human written history — from The Iliad to Jack Reacher; Sun Tzu to Machiavelli to Henry Kissinger; Draco of Sparta (where the term Draconian originates) to Hitler, Mao, and Stalin, to study male intrasexual competition. During this vast timespan, we came to understand its positives and negatives, to create rules to guard against its excesses. In contrast, we have had a mere 50 years to study female intrasexual competition, to understand its positives and negatives, and to create rules to guard against its excesses, which do not exist. As more women enter positions of power across the world, I think it’s vital we look much more deeply into the subject. That’s what I study.
Male intrasexual competition between homosexual men, is, like female intrasexual competition, a novelty, but it more resembles the normal case of MIC than FIC. How often have we witnessed mass brawls of women fist-fighting over access to males? Not often.
And this is the point. Average behavioral sex differences in the expression of competition and aggression remain stable across sexes, regardless of gender. This is why I created Darwinian Gender Studies.
For example, homosexual men experience less sexual jealousy than heterosexual men. The fracas in Bangkok was not primarily an emotional one, but a monetary one. The evolutionary explanation for this is obvious: men don’t get pregnant and so men have fear of being cuckolded - a major evolutionary selection pressure for men and not for women. Across evolutionary time a woman has always known who her children are. Men on the other hand do not. As the saying goes “mama’s baby, dada’s maybe.” It’s a brute evolutionary fact in most mammals. We know from various sources, biological and social, that humans are not a wildly sociosexual or promiscuous species. If you believe otherwise because you have read Sex At Dawn, I recommend you read its masterful 2012 rebuttal Sex At Dusk: Lifting the Shiny Wrapping from Sex at Dawn, written by another independent evolutionary scholar Lynn Saxon. Sure, there are promiscuous individuals, but these are mostly explained by personality traits or culture, not innate human nature and they are not the normal case in humans when left to free roam.2
We get most of this data from looking at cross-cultural differences, parsing between what a culture dictates and what, when asked, humans say they prefer. There are ways to further parse these attitudes and see when social desirability bias is at play. We also have evidence from egalitarian hunter/gatherer societies whose way of life has barely changed over twelve thousand years. These groups are rare today, but they tell us a lot, especially when we compare their systems alongside material evidence such as tool and weapon making. Their culture is largely evoked and not transmitted as ours is in the West.
We decry the 50% divorce rate in the West, yet this is the stable divorce rate amongst egalitarian hunter/gatherers. It’s no mystery that as the West has become more egalitarian, its populace is gravitating more toward a human behavioral universal.
We are serially monogamous/polygamous, i.e., monogamish. Where do you think the seven-year itch comes from? This isn’t to say some humans don’t voluntarily pair bond for life: 50% of us do!
And this 50% statistic shows us where we stand between the two extremes of our ape cousins gorillas, (99.99% polygynous) and chimps (largely promiscuous across the two species). Of course, it’s vastly more complex than this, but for the scope of this essay, this suffices.
The biological evidence comes from ratios of sexual dimorphism between males and female intraspecies, and males and females interspecies. Let’s look at testes size. Silverback gorillas — who fiercely guard ‘harems’ and do not live in competitive multi-male groups, and who have the greatest paternal surety of any ape — have tiny testes. Why? Because sperm competition is not a problem for them, unlike chimps who live in multi-male/multi-female groups where the females mate with many males. As a consequence, much of the battle for reproductive success happens within the female reproductive tract. The evolutionary solution to this is sperm competition. And the more sperm you have the better your chances of success. As a consequence, chimps have ENORMOUS testes.
(In a funny aside, I was looking for this exact picture on my laptop but couldn’t find it so I googled. Before I found it I stumbled upon this version of it on NBC News where the poor guy’s best features have been airbrushed out. I thought there was a rule about the press not using doctored pictures. Isn’t this what the Princess Catherine storm in a teacup is all about?)
A more academic illustration.
Perhaps female secondary sexual characteristics, such as breasts, serve a similar function and this is why breast enlargement surgery is a multi-billion dollar industry, as well as lip fillers, hair & nail extensions, face lifts, botox, and the list goes on, corresponding to all female secondary sexual characteristics that signal reproductive fitness. Maybe that’s why ladyboys and transwomen get breast implants; to attract men with their fake female secondary sexual characteristics while often not opting for the full pharaonic. Okay, I’m half joking. If you want to read more about the evolution of female human breasts and why they are not the same as mammaries, click here.
I could list many more examples, but I don’t like to make my articles too long. You can be assured that I will be returning to the subject in an article currently in my drafts which looks at Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in terms of the male, not unwarranted, evolved fear and obsession with cuckoldry, which I call The Leontes Complex. It could be as harmful to male reproductive fitness as rape is to women.
Most writers turn to Othello when wanting to discuss both Shakespeare and heterosexual male jealousy, and to be sure, Othello is a masterpiece but he did not have children. Unlike Othello, in this tale, children and paternal surety, are front and center. The Winter’s Tale, though it might be sacrilege to say it, is not one of Shakespeare’s best, although with some moments of brilliance such as Hermione’s dignified attempts to defend herself and her two children against the tyranny of her husband’s paranoia in Act III scene II. On the subject of Shakespeare, I both agree and disagree with Tolstoy. He thinks he’s 100% mediocre. I think it’s more like 50-50. Just like us monogamish humans.
For more on the sex/gender subject pick from a plethora of papers by Michael Bailey here and Kenneth Zucker here
This is not to say legacy media is not cliquish, but it is not obscure. New media on the political and philosophical center and right claim to be the saviors of truth, battling against leftist obscurantism and cronyism, when it appears to be blindly walking in the same direction. Beware the invisible hand of evolved human nature and intrasexual competition taking us right where we claim we do not want to go.
Excellent piece.
The point about humans being sorta monogamous is one I am glad to see someone else make... I was arguing with Tove K over at Wood from Eden about that a month or so back making the same point: if a certain behavior (marriage with some periodic side action maybe, but generally life long pair mating) shows up in every society, it probably isn't because all human societies decided to subvert a human nature that is naturally super promiscuous, but more likely because pairing up is pretty much human nature.
If I were take a swing at "What's the point of calling mainstream media and academia not fit for purpose, captured and woke if its new media replacement has no ethics about plagiarism?" I think the argument would be about "what is it supposed to do?"
The mainstream media is supposed to help understand what is going on, but it lies all the time in favor of its narrative. So does damned near everyone else, so that's a problem, but the MSM pretends that it doesn't. If one is looking to actually find out what is happening one is stuck going through all the sources, sifting out what is incomplete and bad as best one can. I have more trust in a source that says "This is what I think about what I think matters" than one saying "All the news that is fit to print", even if I know both are biased. I am really touchy about lies and overselling, however.
When it comes to academia, their relation to outsiders is one of "We know best, so listen to what we say. You know we know best because we work hard to excise bad ideas so if we are in important positions we must really know our stuff." If it turns out that they are in their position not because they have gone through the crucible of doing lots of good work that was actually really smart, but just because they copy/pasted enough to get by and then parroted back the party lines they were supposed to then you can't trust they know what they are talking about. Although, again, you shouldn't be too credulous anyway because all academia is a cliquey mess since they are usually so divorced from actual results that the game is one of convincing other people your work is good, not one of demonstrating that your work is good because it works. Still, when you find academics are willing to outright lie about their work, and others are willing to back them up in their lies, you can figure the entire edifice isn't worth much.
Then you get to the new media. I think there is a big problem with plagiarism, although why is perhaps a little different. I think many people don't know who first came up with ideas because, like the old media, they are not burying themselves in the literature, because they are not monomaniacally focused on single questions, and anyway there is too much literature to read even if you are. Even in academia we don't call it plagiarism if someone talks about the same ideas without citing someone, only if they are obviously copy and pasting the ideas, because lots of people come up with ideas independently of each other, often not even based on the same reading list. Plus it is often the case that we hear something or read something and don't even remember where after a while, and are just trying to explain ideas we picked up at some point.
However, what we can and should absolutely crack down upon is when writers use bad logic, lie, or lean on emotional "vibes" instead of coherent argument. That last one especially I think is dangerous, as it triggers our confirmation bias excessively. All media and academics are prone to those failings, which seems to be why all sides are prone to falling into demagoguery.
On Intrasexual Competition: Great read. (I came across your 'Stack today via Substack Reads.) On the subject of intrasexual competition, I think you'd find this an interesting read: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired.....intro:
"Under this title I explore a theme that gets very little attention in journalism about romantic and sexual pair bonding – the huge difference between the fortunes of what one might term the More and the Less Desired of each sex. Opinion pieces, sometimes serious and sometimes coy, on the subject of unfair sex are to be found in abundance. What always strikes me when I read this kind of journalism is how it is always framed in terms of a generic species called ‘Women’ and a generic species called ‘Men’; as if the perceived ‘unfair’ asymmetries under discussion are entirely ones between the sexes. ......The huge intra-sexual differences between the experiences of pretty women and ‘plain’ ones; and between confident ‘alpha’ males and ‘betas’ – this never gets considered......"