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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:51
Women, Beauty, Voting and Tyranny!
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Summertime and the livin' was easy.
Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high.
Your daddy's rich and your mama's good looking.
So hush, little baby, don't you cry.
Hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Mollendon, Freedom Made Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
This show is about one line from that great song, and it really is around the question of what is it that makes a woman feel sexy?
What is it that makes a woman feel attractive?
Ah, if we unlock this mystery, my friends, we will be a long way towards figuring out kind of what's wrong with the modern world.
So first and foremost, the thing to understand is that women control the vast majority of domestic spending 80 85 percent if you look at the ads on primetime tv they're almost all aimed at women and if you go to malls there's like one tip-top tailors where women go to shop for their men and maybe one little computer store in the back where guys can go and hide out but the rest of it is all dedicated towards women and my god relentlessly
shallow shit it is too i mean perfumes and makeup and handbags and all this kind of frou-frou nonsense that consumes resources and destroys animals and what does it serve well it serves a very very important purpose The key line from the song, don't worry I won't sing again, the key line from the song is, your daddy's rich and your mama's good-looking.
This is the fundamental trade-off in certainly the human species and a lot of other species as well.
Men gather resources in order to purchase the most attractive woman.
The woman makes herself attractive in order to receive the resources she needs for herself and in particular for her children, right?
I mean throughout most of human evolution women were laid up
for a significant portion of their adult life uh... uh... getting and breeding and growing and pumping out children and during that time they were pretty much disabled from doing anything particularly functional i mean they you know while they're pregnant they're not particularly helpful in the hunter-gatherer society then when they have the baby they have to heal they might die and also of course breastfeeding and so on it's uh... tough to be to be productive so a woman needs a huge amount of resources in order to have children.
And she has a great deal of difficulty with that because for a man, if he decides not to have children, his life is pretty easy because he only has to get like 20% or 15% of the resources he would otherwise have to get because he only has to feed himself and not his wife and, you know, five or six or seven children. his life is pretty easy because he only has to So she has to make herself hugely attractive to a man.
And she also then has to withhold sexuality until he commits to her, which is the traditional till death was part and I swear to be true to you kind of stuff that goes on.
So the woman makes herself into the honey trap.
She makes herself as attractive as humanly possible, and then she gets the man to commit to her.
They have sex, they have children, and the man continues to feed resources to her.
I remember I thought about this the other day because years ago, I used to live at Young and Eglinton, or as they call it, Young and Eligible in Toronto, which is kind of like a hip, hip young street for people.
And I used to go to yoga.
I used to have these great Sundays.
I'd do like an hour and a half of aromatherapy, then an hour and a half of yoga, and then just pour myself into a bathtub.
It was just lovely.
And in the yoga class, there was some, I mean, just stunning women.
And there was one woman, I used to chat with them sometimes.
And there was one woman I chatted with, and she said she was just gorgeous.
And she was like, oh, I'd really like to start my own health food store.
And I was a successful entrepreneur at the time.
I guess I still am with this show.
But - Right.
I felt this like massive gravity well open up over my wallet, which is like, I can help you get that started.
I can give you advice.
Maybe I can help you with some investors.
Like it was like she had a desire.
She was a beautiful woman.
And therefore, I just felt this gravity well.
I must provide her with resources in order to show her that I am a fit partner and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I didn't even like her that much.
It was okay as a person, nothing particularly impressive, but as just this, give money to beautiful women, that's just what men kind of do.
And so this is, it's not a bad, no negative judgments about this, just the way it works biologically.
So men, you know, go around gathering resources and accumulate resources in order to attract the most beautiful women.
And so for women, beauty is not even figuratively, but literally it is a commodity, in that the more attractive a woman makes herself, the more resources she can get from a more financially endowed man, which is, you know, plus point survival for her offspring.
So it may look frivolous, you know, for women to dedicate themselves so much towards physical attractiveness, but it is their job, so to speak.
I'm speaking generally on exceptions and blah blah blah, but it is biologically their job to make themselves as attractive as possible, because a man's sexual attraction towards a woman is predicated upon physical signs that she is Going to be fertile and healthy, right?
Lustrous hair, even features, which means a diverse DNA base and, you know, the hip to waist ratio, which men are attracted to, is very indicative of fertility and childbearing capacity and so on.
The fact that women are more comfortable with older men and men are not as much comfortable with older women is because, you know, older men have more resources and older women have less fertility and hey, this is all pretty obvious stuff.
And, of course, the standards of beauty change when food is rare, then being overweight is considered the most attractive, right?
So you get these Rubenesque paintings of sort of the 18th century or whatever because food was scarce and therefore to be overweight was showing conspicuous consumption.
Now that food is plentiful, then being thin, of course, is in because it shows that you have self-control, self-discipline, and so on.
When men worked in the fields, then having a tan was unattractive.
Now that men work in offices, having a tan means you have the leisure to go to the beach, and that means that you are more attractive.
When men used to work with their hands and arms, then having muscles was unattractive.
Like if you look at Humphrey Bogart, I mean, he was like noodle arm extraordinaire.
Whereas now, when you don't work with your hands and arms other than to type, Not a big bulky activity.
Not big bulking up activity.
Now having muscles is considered to be the ideal and so on.
So a lot of what men do to make themselves look attractive is they gather resources, and a lot of what women do to make themselves attractive is they become beautiful.
They try to become shapely and so on.
And beautiful women, there's that line from that song, Are You Gonna Be My Girl, where he says, you don't need money when you look like that, do you, honey?
Right?
Because people will buy the woman drinks, people will buy her dinner, people will buy her just stuff, they'll put her through school, they'll just give her money because that's what men do to fertile women is give them money as a way of showing their fitness as men who can provide resources for when the woman is pregnant and having babies and breastfeeding and so on.
So a woman's focus on her attractiveness is biologically as essential as a man's focus on his productivity.
And historically, this is the way that it used to work.
A lot of what women have as signs of attractiveness are actually signs of desirability in general.
Not just two men, but two other women, right?
So if a woman has long nails, what's she saying?
She's saying, I don't have to work with my hands.
I don't work with fields.
I don't have to pull up weeds.
I don't even have to type.
Like I'm so beautiful that I can have these long, ridiculous nails.
That means that I don't actually have to do any of my own labor, which shows that another man is providing her resources, which means that she's attractive.
It's the same thing with silly hairstyles.
Like I have enough time to make my hair look this way because I'm not busy rushing out to work 12 hours a day.
High heels means I don't have to have anything productive.
High heels, narrow skirts, like all the ridiculous frou-frou that goes on.
Makeup and all this means I have time and I don't sweat.
I'm not out there sweating in the sun, picking crops and so on so I can have makeup.
I don't have to walk anywhere with firm footing.
I don't have to walk on soft ground.
I don't have to work with my feet.
Therefore, I can have heels.
I can put my legs in a tight dress because I never need to run or move my body around.
A lot of what is...
is depicted in women's fashion is signs of not having to work for a living, which shows that they're attractive enough that a man is giving them resources.
The same thing with women who wear white, not after Labor Day, or so I'm told.
But why do women wear white?
Well it says that they don't work anywhere near machines, they don't work anywhere near dirt, they really don't have to work at all, and therefore they can keep themselves in this Christine Baranski style pristine whiteness.
And you can sort of go on and on with this kind of stuff.
It's pretty obvious.
But a lot of what makes a woman feel the most attractive is when A man is giving her resources.
So women are kind of primed to get stuff for free because the degree to which they can get stuff for free is the degree to which they are reassured as to their level of attractiveness.
And this is very important to understand because it has huge ramifications in the economy, in politics, in dating, and so on.
When a woman receives something for free, that is a mark Of how attractive she feels when she gets stuff for free.
And if you don't understand that, it's really hard to understand the state.
It's hard to understand voting patterns.
It's hard to understand national debts.
It's hard to understand why the state is growing so ferociously at the moment.
Like, men want multiple sexual partners in order to feel attractive.
Like, a Playboy, a Lothario, a Valentino, a Clooney goes around and has really attractive partners.
And that's how he feels.
Like, he gets the sexiest woman to to date him, but he doesn't have to commit to them.
Therefore, he's so attractive that women would just throw themselves at him for his looks or his money or his charisma or whatever.
And he doesn't have to settle down with any of them.
That's how a man feels most sexy.
Whereas a woman feels most sexy when she's getting free stuff, because that's kind of what her sexiness is designed for, just as a man's resources are designed to attract to him, um, fertile women, right?
Rich, famous, powerful, don't even have to be good looking.
And you get women to throw themselves at you because they're primed to response program to respond to a man with resources and a man is programmed to response to a woman who is beautiful, physically beautiful and fertile and so on.
So if you, uh, if you understand this, the Then what appears to be frivolity on the part of women, like you look at women's magazines and it's always, you know, some beautiful woman and how to be beautiful and how to be attractive and how to give your man mind-blowing sex and blah blah blah, right?
This is all the commodity on the part of women.
It's an investment into themselves in order to get resources from men to help raise their children.
Okay, so we understand that.
One of the great mysteries of public choice theory, or of how democracy affects the size and power of the state, is for over a hundred years in America, let's say, to focus on a specific example, for over a hundred years, up until sort of the early 20th century, government didn't really grow.
Like, government would grow during times of war, and then it would shrink again, back down.
But starting in the early 20th century, early 1900s, something kind of Wookiee began to happen, right?
Which was that the government began to grow and grow and grow.
And it never has really stopped growing, and that growth is continuing to accelerate.
Now, and I'll put the link to this in the description of the video and in the notes for the podcast.
Some great work has been done on this by a Yale professor and some other guy I can't remember where he's from.
And they have very well established the degree to which when you give women the vote, Women will begin to vote for free stuff.
Now, please understand, I'm not a big fan of not giving women the vote.
I'm not a big fan of government as a whole, but that's neither beside the point.
Sorry, that's beside the point.
We're just not going to focus on the facts.
This is not anti-women at all.
We're just looking at the patterns that are important to understand if you want to figure out why the government is so big, why it keeps growing, and why it continues to accelerate in this growth.
Now, because men want to keep their resources in order to attract women, men don't want a big government.
Why?
Because the government takes resources from them in the form of taxation or inflation, fueled by debt and so on.
And of course governments shouldn't be big where men are around because men get scooped up into all of these horrible wars all the time.
So men don't want the government to become big because the government will take their resources.
And if the government takes their resources, then they have fewer resources with which to attract beautiful fertile women to come and polish their bishop or whatever.
This sort of explains that when men had the vote, and particularly when property men have the vote, the government stays small.
And this was well known in the 19th century.
They said, well, if you give the poor the vote, the poor will vote to take away the property of the rich and everyone will become poor.
The whole economic system will collapse.
And there were these concerns with women as well, which is that women don't pay into the system because they were not really much tax cattle at all.
Men pay into the system, therefore they want to keep government small.
Women don't pay into the system, and therefore they will try to pull money out of the system without it directly affecting their income in the same way.
And this statistically and historically has been borne out very, very well.
This is very true, that in America, different states gave the women the vote at different times.
And like clockwork, government growth began to double very shortly.
Uh, sorry, not government growth.
Government actual spending doubled very quickly after women got the vote.
And as more women exercised the right to vote, then government growth continued extraordinarily.
Now, there's a number of reasons for this.
One of them, of course, is that women statistically, and this is true across the world, are kind of risk averse.
Relative to men, which makes sense, right?
You got to feed your kids every day.
If you've got five kids, you can't be saving up a whole bunch of money and going to start your own business.
Not really, right?
Whereas if you're a young single man, you can go and do that kind of stuff.
And so women tend to be more risk averse.
But women, while being more risk-averse, are engaged in the highly risky activity of having children.
I don't just mean risky in terms of, like, you can die from childbirth throughout history, but you really, really need those resources.
And if you can't get those resources, it's one thing to say, well, I'll go without food.
It's another thing to say, my five children are going to go without food.
That's a very different matter.
So women are risk-averse, but women are engaged in the incredibly risky activity of having children.
And traditionally, the way that women would mitigate that risk is to choose a really reliable man.
To choose a man to be their husband, to be the father of their children, who was going to stick around, who was going to be consistent, who was going to be constant.
Who would be virtuous?
Who would be responsible?
Who would not sleep around?
So women, of course, want hot guys in the same way that guys want hot women.
Just look at Teen Tiger Beat magazine, as I often do, and you will see it's just an endless parade of Justin Bieber-style pretty boys.
And women want the pretty boys, but pretty boys are dangerous for women, right?
Because you have a child, but the pretty boy, he's just going to, so many other women go throwing themselves at him that he's going to wander off with some other woman and leave you holding the kid with no income and no resources, which, you know, in history was actually kind of fatal.
If a woman had children and no one to provide her resources, I mean, really could be pretty fatal and certainly would be a life ruining event, which is why before the rise of the welfare state, which we'll get to in a sec.
Women, and parents in particular, mothers and fathers, would strongly try to control all of the wayward and society-destroying tendencies of teenage sexuality.
Or, in particular, teenage fertility, which is really the problem.
Sexuality is not the problem, but pregnancy is really the problem.
So women want hot guys, they want George Clooney's six-packs or whatever, but they also know that that's a very risky strategy.
It might pay off really well, but given that a woman becomes less attractive after she has children at a variety of levels, right?
I mean, she's breastfeeding, it's messy, it's goopy, her vagina is torn up, her belly never really regains its former shape and so on.
Given all of that, Then if a woman goes after a really hot guy, then she becomes less attractive.
In other words, her currency goes down.
The hot guy becomes more attractive, usually because if he chooses to leave his family, he's got lots more resources.
At least he's very physically attractive.
And so, women kind of had to grit their teeth and cross their legs throughout history.
The pretty boys were very sexy and they wanted to sleep with them, but very, very risky.
In fact, an almost certainly self-destructive act of
Biological suicide right so so they kind of had to grit their teeth and not go for the pretty boys But you know go for the Dudley do rights go for the You know the accountants the the whatever whoever was going to be constant and good now This actually was a kind of a positive thing because we can't all be hot, but we can be virtuous and responsible and study and be a good provider and so on if and what this meant was that women are
Because their primary insurance against loss was a steady, productive, reliable husband would reward steady, reliable, productive men with marriage and children.
Right?
And so, since women would only settle down with steady, reliable, constant men, those virtues were encouraged.
In men.
Like if you want to get a woman to settle down with you, maybe a one night stand or whatever, but if you want to get a woman to settle down with you, then you need to be like a good provider.
You need to be reasonable, steady, stable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So these virtues were encouraged in men.
And you know, yay, I think that was all pretty good.
Now when women get the vote, then women want stuff for free because that makes them feel attractive.
And this is not just silly at all, right?
Because some women, Would marry guys who were bad, who were drunks, who were irresponsible.
They'd go to the races and blow all their money on the ponies and stuff like that.
And this was really bad.
Prohibition was driven by the Women's Temperance Union.
The Women's Temperance Union brought organized crime into America in this sort of ironic twist, right?
Because prohibition brought organized crime into America.
There was very little of it before that.
Uh, and then I think 13 or 14 years later when it was repealed, the organized crime stayed because of gambling, prostitution and drugs and so on.
But prohibition was what brought all of the organized crime over from Europe and in particular, of course, the Italian-Sicilian corridor.
And so...
Women who make mistakes in who they marry are in a very desperate situation.
If the man abandons them, if the man decides to go and pick grapes in Queensland, or dig for gold in the Klondike and never comes back, or is a drunk, or a layabout, or lazy, or whatever.
If they've made a mistake in who they marry, well, by God, they still need resources, because they've got to pay their kids, right?
Sorry, pay their kids.
They've got to feed their kids, and so on.
And so women vote for the government to provide them With the resources they need to feed their children.
And this is very, very important to understand.
At a very basic biological level, women are delighted to receive free stuff, right?
And since women historically have not contributed financially to the running of the state in any particular or significant way, it seems free.
Like the kind of language that drives libertarians nuts, which is, you know, the government has committed to pay 500 million dollars to X, Y, and Z.
The government has no money.
The government has pledged to steal, print, or borrow 500 million dollars, is an accurate way of putting it, right?
Like, I remember even as a kid, there's this Government of Ontario train, it's called the GO Train, and it says, there's a little sign up there that says the operation of this train is supported by the Government of Ontario.
And I remember even as a kid thinking, well that's not true, it's the taxpayers of Ontario.
Because the government has no money.
The government takes money and gives money.
And so all of this language though is specifically designed to appeal to women.
When Barack Obama gets up there and says, I am going to give you all of these great things, I'm going to commit this and that, he sounds like a husband or a rich guy who's going to give you money.
And that's at a very primal level.
I'm not saying this occurs at the level of consciousness, but at a very primal level.
That is incredibly powerful for women, for an attractive, intelligent, competent man to offer them resources.
I mean, all you have to do is look at, you know, the endless stories that have come out of history.
The prince charming guy who swoops in and, take me away from all this, says Cinderella, says whoever, right?
I mean, they have this life of drudgery, this man swoops in, the prince swoops in and takes them away for the gauze slippers and the balls and all this kind of stuff, right?
I mean, dancing balls and maybe the other kind too.
This is how women are kind of programmed at a deep level.
They respond to attractive men offering them free stuff because that's what their beauty is designed to do.
And so if you look at what happens, a lot of people think that in America that the sort of nanny state or the socialist state started in the 1930s under FDR.
But this is not true.
It accelerated in the '20s and '30s, but it was really in the pre-First World War and First World War and immediately after a period that the government really began to grow, which coincided with the spread of women's suffrage.
And again, this is not to blame women or anything like that, it's just natural.
Look, if the government offered to deliver you five ethnic beauties of your choice every week to have sex with as a guy, you'd probably be pretty excited by that offer, and you wouldn't necessarily think of the consequences of it.
And in the same way, when women can vote to get free stuff that they don't have to contribute to, Now, married women tend to vote for smaller government, and unmarried women tend to vote for larger government.
The reason that unmarried women vote for smaller government is they know that if the government taxes more, then it's going to tax their husband, who's earning money, in general.
Or themselves, of course, if they're in the workforce, as I think 70% of Canadian kids' mothers are.
Whereas unmarried women are going to get far more benefits than they're going to pay in taxes, particularly if it's health care under Obamacare and stuff like that, health care, pediatric dental care, health care for kids and so on.
They're going to get way more out of it than they pay into it.
And so in the 1930s, the rise of the nanny state coincided with the escalation of female voting that had started in the 19-teens, early 20th century.
And if you look at what happened, it was stuff for kids, stuff for women, and stuff for the elderly.
Why was Social Security such a selling point?
Well, partly because, of course, the old vote and so on.
But why did it become so important?
Because who takes care of the elderly historically is women.
So when the government says, we will provide resources to your aged grandmother or grandfather, women are like, whew, that helps me out a huge amount, because otherwise I've got to go over and take care of them, or we've got to give them money, or I've got to go wipe their butt or whatever.
So when we talk about Medicare, Medicaid for the elderly and for the poor, that's fantastic.
That's ambrosia for women, because women traditionally take care of the elderly, and therefore they're big supporters of government resources being provided to children.
To the elderly.
So these are all really, really important things to understand.
There's a reason why one of the top Democratic strategists in the United States says that single mothers are about the most reliable voting bloc that the Democrat Party has.
Unmarried women voted overwhelmingly on the left.
They vote overwhelmingly on the left because they need someone to give them resources.
If it's not going to be a husband, then it's going to be the state.
Because they need the resources either way.
They can't be particularly fussy about political ideologies or whether taxation is theft or anything like that.
They can't do any of that because they just gotta feed their kids.
And, you know, property rights be damned.
It doesn't really matter.
My kids are hungry.
I need food.
Now one of the things that happens with that, which is really tragic, is the general corruption of masculinity that occurs When women are no longer rewarding the steadiest and most productive and most reliable and most rational and most even-tempered men with the fruits of their loins, women don't have to choose reliable men anymore.
So some women become single mothers, you know, there's an accident, there's a problem, the guy gets sick, maybe they don't have insurance, they make mistakes, or they're just grindingly poor.
And what happens is that They end up really wanting these resources.
And so a law is passed that says, well, if you're in this situation, we'll give you stuff through the government.
And before that, there were friendly societies, there were churches, there were charities, and so on.
I mean, Americans in particular, particularly those on the right, are staggeringly generous.
One of the reasons that the right is less of a fan of the welfare state is the right through religion to some degree but in general gives far more in charity than the left.
And the left thinks everyone is stingy and therefore we need the government to help.
That's just projection because the left are generally stingy and the only money they tend to give is money for the government or to the government.
And so what happens is that a law is passed to help the women in need and that fundamentally changes the equation.
Because if a woman can survive, I don't mean flourish, if a woman can survive by having kids with unreliable guys, that's more to her, I want to sleep with the hot guy, you know, or the thug or the motorcycle guy or whoever it is who's sexy but completely unreliable.
A woman will then not grit her teeth and cross her legs, but will sleep with the guy knowing that the state will pick up the consequences.
In other words, she's married to the state, but she is having an affair with the attractive men.
This means that men have less incentive to go out and do the boring, dull, unimaginative stuff that you need to do to become a productive woman.
Man, like I was working at a hardware store, I cleaned offices, I painted plaques, I worked in a bookstore, I was a waiter, like all the boring stuff that you need to do to get work experience and become fundamentally competent at any kind of economic productivity.
Men don't want to do that, which is why you get this whole failure to launch thing.
You know, the guys who like don't want to get married, they play video games, they go travel, they go to clubs and all that kind of stuff.
My 20s, I guess.
And that all makes perfect sense.
Because A lot of the stuff that you have to do to be a good provider is kind of boring, particularly in the short run.
I mean, go be an accountant.
I mean, how much fun is that?
But it's, you know, it's a good provider, right?
And I was reading this book to my daughter about Eric Costner called Emil and the Detectives, which I'd highly recommend.
It's a fun book.
And in it, the woman is talking, she's a single mom, and the woman is talking about her sister.
And she says about her sister, oh, her husband has a great job, it's completely steady, it's totally reliable, it's in the post office.
Working in the post office is dull from a man's point of view, but it's ambrosia from a woman's point of view if there's no welfare state.
And this is really important to understand.
Government work also has a lot to do with hiring women and so on.
The Democratic Party is Basically, dysfunctional single women and single mothers needing resources, minorities seeking power and resources, and public sector unions looking to rip everyone.
It's a party of irresponsibility and criminality, but there's problems with the Democrats as well, particularly the military-industrial complex, but it's neither here nor there.
I'm just talking about the sort of biological drivers that are occurring in terms of growing the state.
As women marry the state, Then men become less responsible, because there's less value in it, right?
I mean, what's the first question?
I don't know if they still do this.
When I was a kid, every now and then, the lazy-ass teachers would put on a movie, right?
And in science class, they would put on a movie.
The first question you'd ask is, is this going to be on the test?
And if the answer is no, this is not going to be on the test.
Everyone would start doodling or whatever, right?
This is before you could fight away your time with an iPhone.
And so, is it going to be on the test?
Well, if it's not going to be on the test, then you're not really going to, right?
And so, if there's no test called, I can't get married unless I'm responsible, am I not going to really value responsibility very much?
What's the point?
Why bother?
And so women are still going to want to have kids, but they're going to marry the state.
And when they marry the state, right, the faceless alpha male of statism, then men become less responsible, because as they marry the state, taxes have to go up.
As taxes go up, there's less value and less possibility of accumulating resources as a man, so you don't bother with any of this stuff.
And so more women get pregnant, more women need the state, which drives more men out of the marriage market, and so on.
And again, I'm not aiming this to be critical of women or critical of men.
I'm simply talking about the very well-known biological drivers that are fueling the growth of the state.
Who suffers, of course, in this situation is always those with the least power and the least capacity.
for independence, which is the children.
Of course, the children of single mothers face a plethora of hell-baked dysfunctions and problems in their adult lives.
And so it is the children who suffer and the children are going to suffer even more when, you know, the faceless alpha male state runs out of carrion to bring home and the whole system collapses.
But the effects of the power of the state and of the power of voting are particularly catastrophic in the realm
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