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Welcome to the second installment of what will likely be a series on the question of what’s wrong with native-born American men! (Check out the kickoff post here)
This week I interviewed Indian Bronson: Founder, Writer, and aggressive Tweeter who’s very concerned about who is, and isn’t, reproducing.
I’d noticed him on some of @defaultfriend’s threads, then he had quite a lot to say about my April thread on, among other things, female breadwinners.
I tend to want/try to genuinely want/try to understand the best arguments against my assumptions and understanding. So as the loudest, most thoughtful antagonist (two great tastes that aren’t usually found together) to my ideas I thought it might be worth picking his brain on the topic.
Below you can find a video of the interview, along with a lightly corrected machine-generated transcript.
I want to make a note that in interviewing IB I am not in any way co-signing anything he’s ever said. The question of who to platform is a complicated, nuanced question and I’m not at all confident I’m making all the right choices. But I do think that it’s not my way to never listen to anyone who has ever said anything I find abhorrent. That would mean I’d never be allowed to listen to myself.
In the interview we address the fact that a large percentage of DEI efforts basically don’t work and some, like unconscious bias training, often make things worse. He claims, essentially, that’s because the people they’re targeting are fundamentally incapable of performing as well as the baseline if given the opportunity. I didn’t argue with him in the interview because it was tangential to what I was trying to argue about and probably because I assumed it would have taken a lot of time just to clarify both our positions on that particular claim. But I’ll clarify here that I extremely, strongly, fundamentally disagree with that idea. I hope I’ve misunderstood his position. But in case anyone else interprets it similarly, my position on the question is:
Measurable, systemic barriers to employment persist for marginalized people and negatively impact their job offers, promotions, projects, pay raises, treatment at work, and more.
Given more equal treatment, resources, and opportunities, marginalized people can and do perform as well as or better than the baseline at work.
That said, here’s the video and transcript:
Cathy: Hi Indian. Thanks for taking the time. I'd love to start with just kind of a general introduction of you and the expertise and perspective you're bringing to the topic. And just to clarify. So I tweeted a while ago about the issue of changing demographic data and how it is likely impacting marriage rates and the way that Americans are marrying. And you were one of the loudest, most ferocious disagreers. You even wrote a whole blog post about it. I wanted to get you on to kind of dig deeper into where we disagree and specifically have some questions for you. If you could just kind of introduce yourself and your perspective, I'd appreciate it.
Indian: Yeah. So I go by Indian Bronson, IB, any moniker works. I have a day job, but I like to blog about things I find interesting. I think there are a lot of sort of like tech Twitter people who kind of dip their toes into some of the contemporary discourse around men or women and fertility and stuff like that. But what bugs me is that it's usually very superficial. It's sometimes like, huh, it's kind of weird. Birth rates are falling and it's sort of left there. But I think it's actually one of the most important and interesting topics there is cuz this is literally how the species reproduces.
If you stop and think about it, it's everything from are we gonna colonize Mars to what are our gas prices going to be to can the Ukrainians field X-many troops against the Russians or whatever. All of this stuff kind of comes down to how many people we have and what kind of quality they are.
If we can provide for ourselves, everything from housing prices to sort of more lofty goals about the future of a civilization are basically innately tied to this. So it's something that I think about a lot. I read a lot about, and yes, loudly disagree about on Twitter when I have a perspective to.
Cathy: Great. Yeah. I love that. And, yeah, fertility is super interesting. I think I'm less interested in it particularly, and more is just kind of a bucket of issues that are super interesting to me. Sex, gender, feminism, economics, all these things. I wanted to get into… essentially, I'm looking at a list of problems that seem to disproportionately impact native-born American men.
I'm of the belief that these problems are to some extent, to varying extents, very interrelated. And then I have four potential solutions and I wanted to get your thoughts on. Particularly, the normalization of female breadwinners as a potential solution to these problems.
But first I'm gonna just kinda list the problems. They're obviously broad categories, but I wanted to just ask you whether there's anything that you feel like is salient that's not on the list. So the list is low and declining labor force participation rates, wage stagnation, loss of economic mobility, loss of status, changing gender roles, deaths of despair, atomization, radicalization, grievance politics, violence, and populism.
Indian: One thing I would note is that a lot of these problems, I think they're more visible among native-born men, and there are some selection effects among immigrant men that kind of like fuzz the data. So let's take the bucket of all men who do immigrate from Latin America to the United States including those who immigrate illegally.
And let's take the bucket of all men who can immigrate to the United States from, let's say Eastern Europe, South Asia, East Asia. If those are the only two things that you know about them, whether they come legally or whether they come illegally or what region they're from, there's a lot that travels along with that.
Right? So if you look at just immigrant men's wages in the United States, it's like, yeah, there are a lot of Indian and Chinese men with very, very high incomes. But that's not necessarily the modal immigrant man to the United States. So I think a lot of the problems that you highlight are very visible and very real with native-born men. But it's not actually limited to them. There's a great paper by I think Brostrom, and I forget the other guy's name. I'll try and find the link. They find that actually not-so-educated men and male immigrant labor, they both get exposed to these kinds of vicissitudes of industrialization. A lot of male labor basically gets displaced when that happens.
That certainly did happen to the United States as well. So I think that that's an important thing to keep in mind. But yeah, I mean, let's start with, you know what was it? Let's see. For low education, native-born men, the American dream is dead. Not working or going to school, right? But it's like why should a man work or go to school? What is the purpose of work and going to school? There's a great acronym, NEET, not in education employment, or like jobs training.
That describes an increasingly large share of American men. It describes an increasingly large share of Western men, I would say. And people will look at this and say, why won't these men just man up and do something with their lives? It's like, well, what does it mean to do something with your life?
What is the point of having career aspirations and working hard and doing all of these things? I typically find this charge is coming from the right wing. A lot of right-wing commentators will be like, well, men aren't masculine anymore. Men don't try anymore.
But they never ask. Maybe this is a rational choice that a lot of these men are making. Maybe they're surveying the landscape and they're saying, I'm not gonna try so hard. I'm not gonna do so much work. And I think it's intimately related actually to kind of the collapse in sexual mores.
I think it's intimately related to a collapse in male gender roles being economically necessary. And also the lack of social validation for them. A lot of young men are actually making a very rational choice to just not try so hard.
Cathy: So. Okay. If the reason that men are becoming NEET increasingly is because it doesn't make sense to work hard, why is this affecting men more than women?
Indian: Yeah. If I were to just ask, what year would you expect more women than men began enrolling in post-secondary education? Like two, four year college programs in the US?
Cathy: Hmm. That's a good question. I should know this. I'm gonna guess 1970.
Indian: Yeah. So that's approximately right. 1979 is when total fall enrollment went above men for women. And yet when we think about equity and higher education, it's only very recently that people have noticed that there is this shortfall.
Year over year, over year, you get a more and more feminized campus. You get more and more programs for women, more and more deference given to women, an easier time to be admitted if you're a woman. Women are half the population. And we now have this situation where campuses have hugely lopsided sex ratios.
And yet I think if you proposed affirmative action for men, if someone were to say openly, look, men need to be admitted into universities preferentially over women. How would that play? People would freak out if you said something like that.
Cathy: Well, I mean, two, two points, one. I know this is true in private schools, that men are receiving preferential treatment in admissions because there is such a strong gender gap. So that's already happening. But my second point is I'm not seeing the connection between.
Indian: Why? Yeah. So, the reason this is a connected thing is it's like if you were to tell people right now, I think if you were to tell the majority of people right now, who hadn't studied the issue, Hey, you know what? We actually need to prioritize men's access to higher education over women's in order to have a more equitable and fair campus.
That can be true. And in fact it can be pursued. But if you were to say that like this, this has to be the marching order of the day. People react very negatively to that. I think a lot of people would be like, oh no, that seems wrong. It seems unfair. I think largely society has a bias towards women where we see women as more vulnerable.
We see women as needing more help. People feel bad for women in a way that I don't think people really feel bad for men. I think people expect much more resilience out of men. I think people expect much more agency out of men. I don't think that's a bad thing either. I think men are more resilient.
I think men do have more agency. This is just the nature of being male. But I think we got so far out over our skis in trying to give women a leg up in the workforce, give women a leg up in higher education, that we created a system where actually a lot of men are just totally uninterested in those things.
They don't find those environments really conducive to their success. They don't feel welcome there. And so they just opt out from going, they just don't care about those places anymore.
Cathy: Do you think that men, by-and-large, are actually discriminated against in education and employment?
Indian: Particularly in primary education in America's public schools. Yeah, absolutely. People talk about this all the time with behavioral issues. Boys are significantly more likely to be disciplined for acting out, for being restless, for talking out of turn, essentially being boisterous, loud, young boys than girls.
Female students are much better behaved. Every teacher will tell you this. The model students are very rarely the boys. It's very often girls. Planned, structured obedient environments, they're filled with women. It's not an accident.
Rowdy, cantankerous, unstructured environments of intense competition, these appeal to men. These appeal to young boys. And so the more that we've made institutions (and it's not just education, it's a lot of institutions of life) highly credentialist, very controlled, very much governed by bureaucracy and process, the more female they get and the less male they get. And men kind of go and do other things.
Cathy: I did a Twitter poll today about why people think men are having lower labor force participation rates. A lot of people pointed to the bureaucratization of the hiring process and just being eligible for jobs.
And I do think that credentialism is a big problem, not just for the gender question, but for American growth. But I wanted to get into the possible solutions for what's happening with native-born men. So I have four. They're taking women out of the workforce and/or depressing female wages; implementing universal basic income; trying to boost male wages; or destigmatizing and normalizing a female breadwinner model of marriage.
And before we discuss the other, well, I guess actually before I do anything, is there a solution that's not on this list that you support?
Indian: Sort of. Kind of remove the barriers to male entry. For a few years there was this movement called “Ban the box.” Stop me if you've heard this one.
Cathy: I have, I know.
Indian: For the benefit of people who don't know, there was this campaign to remove, there's a box on a job application that's like, Hey, are you a sex offender? Have you been convicted for something, blah, blah. And it was like, well if we get rid of that, then more people with criminal backgrounds will be able to get jobs. They'll be able to reintegrate in society. That'll be good. And I don't think that's a good thing.
I'm sure you could guess. I do favor discrimination against sex criminals and murderers and felons and stuff like that. I think people should be able to know whether or not that's happening in their workplace. But I do think that a lot of these programs that are like, well, let's destigmatize, let's decriminalize let's normalize these sort of marginalized peoples, I think if you translated those things towards men, in academic institutions, a lot of, let's call them tech and tech-adjacent jobs, if you did that, and more men were basically given a chance to just do work, things would be better.
So that's what I would propose: Let's imagine every native-born American man between the ages of 17 and 22 is like a progressive darling.
Just imagine this is the illegal alien sex offender. How does the most left-wing person operate towards this person? How do they ensure that this person goes to Harvard? How do they ensure that this person gets a job at Google or whatever. Let's do those things, but just do them for native-born American men.
We'd see their fortunes improve. I think that's just true.
Cathy: Well, that's an interesting idea. I guess one thing that I would say as a counterpoint is that, what we've seen is that the seemingly vast majority of things that are being tried seemingly to raise the fortunes of marginalized communities are not working.
Indian: So I would agree they're not working. I think mechanistically they're good ideas, but they don't really understand the people that they're trying to help. We could get deeper into that.
Cathy: It doesn't seem like a similar set of programs aimed at men would work better.
Indian: I think it would work better. Just to be totally blunt. We can explore this or not. I think the kinds of people who often commit felonies, the kinds of people who have like the impulse control that maybe is associated with sex crimes and stuff like that, I just don't think a lot of those people can really be, I think they need something besides independent employment. I think they need something like a more supervised sort of lifestyle, essentially to be wards of the state in a certain way. I think that's the reason those programs often fail. But I think if those programs were offered to people that do have the conscientiousness and the self-discipline and like the wherewithal to compete, then they would do very well.
Cathy: So let's get specific. Like what exactly should we be doing for men?
Indian: One thing that I think would be really good for young boys and men in the United States would be stop pathologizing male behavior. One thing that I think is really gross in the United States is how overprescribed SSRIs are, how overprescribed antidepressants are, how overprescribed ADHD medications are. And people can offer the explanation that, well we're just a lot better now at recognizing oppositional defiant disorder. We're a lot better at recognizing ADHD. And because of that, there are more prescriptions. I really just don't buy it. There have been a lot of civilizations besides ours. There have been a lot of periods of societal bounty besides hours and the rule in a lot of them, we have a very charming phrase in English, “Boys will be boys.” The ability to let boys and young men be kind of rowdy, to horseplay, to be exuberant, to compete with each other, to fight, I mean, one of the nicest things that I think the Jesuits do and this might not be a uniform thing, but I know they do it some, is boys are allowed to fight. But they have to put on boxing gloves and it has to be in front of everyone else. If they wanna have it out, they can. And I think that's a great thing. I think sort of friendly, but not so friendly, competitive combat between young men. My brothers and I, we roughhoused all the time when I was growing up. That kind of behavior is pathologized and circumscribed and it's not allowed in a lot of sort of systematized, overly bureaucratic educational environments. But I think if there were much more leeway, essentially, given to typically healthy male behavior, we'd see better outcomes.
Cathy: It definitely seems like a stretch to me, especially the fighting element. Since I think violence is one of the problems that we need to address. But more broadly, I would say that my main counterargument would be, we seem to be, the United States and the industrialized world, seems to be moving into an economy where demand for rowdy exuberant, violence-prone labor is declining and demand for labor which is more feminine, the ability to sit still for hours at a time and learn new things and especially emotional intelligence, demand for that kind of labor is increasing.
Indian: I think that's true. But I would offer two things not really to counter that, but two things to consider. Writing poetry and making food are two activities that are very, very feminine-coded. But if you look at classical literature, not just in the Western canon, but globally, and if you look at the pinnacle of culinary excellence, you actually get a lot of dudes who are poets and who are chefs.
I think it's true that a lot of skills within the knowledge economy, a lot of work product within the knowledge economy, is produced by having access to and capability with things that are often female-coded or things that are sort of unrelated to physical strength and exuberance and much more related to like a more quiet, thoughtful, internal life.
That's totally true. And it's totally true that a lot of women will excel at it. And yet there's this question of male excellence. In almost every field, including in fields that are female-coded, you very often see that the overwhelming majority of the most excellent, most impactful, most dynamic people are male.
So there's that. There's that one thing to keep in mind. A second thing, and this is kind of a narrow example, do you know what gastronomic societies are? I learned about this in the last year because I went in San Sebastian, in Spain, up in the Basque country, there are all of these little fishing villages. San Sebastian's kind of the biggest city that has this going on.
And as industrialization took hold, there was this situation where a lot of these fishermen, a lot of these men who worked these kinds of jobs, just didn't have that much stuff to do with their time. And so they formed these private kitchens, which were basically they would rent out a room. They would build a kitchen there, and then they would just cook for themselves and drink. They had these essentially multi-generational frats where like the old guys were handling the money and the young guys were made to clean up and something like that.
They're Basque men. They're not Spanish men. And so these were kitchens where women were never allowed. These are and I'll repeat that, cuz it's very funny. It's like the opposite of “Women belong in the kitchen.”
These are kitchens where women were excluded. They were like, no girls allowed. That situation lasted for over a hundred years. And then Anthony Bourdain went, I think there was some Netflix documentary. All of the Michelin star restaurants in that area, they'll talk about these gastronomic societies and suddenly the push is on for women to be like look, we wanna break down the gender barrier. We want, this is part of our culture too. We wanna get in the kitchen. This is literally just guys being guys for like over a hundred years, just like having a good time by themselves and like creating an entire culinary tradition and yet women want to break into that.
You never really see the opposite of that. It's basically like, I can't think of a single thing. And I think we could spend time and try and think about it, of a thing that women have spontaneously organized or that women are best known for, or that is like overwhelmingly female where men are just clamoring to get in.
Cathy: Programming is an example.
Indian: I don't think women really created the field of programming.
[Editors’s (me) note: Women really created the field of programming.]
I mean, yeah, I know about Ada Lovelace. I mean Grace Hopper, all of that. But, if you were to go to the year 1970 and you were to ask, what are the gender ratios in computer science?
Like, yeah. They were a little bit more even than people would suspect.
[Editors’s (me) note: Computer programming was female-dominated until the 1970’s.]
But over time it's like, why is it such a male-coded thing? I don't think it's accidental. I don't think women were just like shoved.
[Editors’s (me) note: As with most sexism, it was much subtler than a shove.]
I think we have to be realistic about certain things that require an immense amount of fixation, a high degree of competitiveness, that don't reward agreeability, that don't reward consensus seeking, and which do reward a dogged pursuit of truth at all costs of stewardship at all costs.
These are environments and social functions that are really hostile to women or women perceive them as hostile. I think that's the reason for the gender imbalance. It's true that maybe there are a lot of things about the knowledge economy that are more feminine-coded. But I think a dogged pursuit of excellence and spontaneous organization of things that have value, these seem very male-coded to me actually.
I don't think it's really true that the indispensability of men will be dispensed with, just the opposite actually.
Cathy: Well, just a point of clarification. You do see that men tend to be clustered more so at the margins, at least of intelligence and probably also of certain kinds of performance. And so that means that yes, they are disproportionately represented at the top. But they are also disproportionately represented at the bottom. So just wanted to include that. But so it sounds like what you're saying is a pretty popular solution to at least the wage gap, which is encouraging men to enter traditionally female-dominated or female-coded fields.
Indian: No not entering traditionally female-dominated, female-coded things. I would say just take the barriers away from men. There are a lot of artificial barriers that are designed basically to promote women, or to make things sort of quote, safe for women that I really don't think are necessary at all.
Cathy: What are some examples?
Indian: Yeah. So, recently do remember the blowup at the Washington Post with Felicia Son and Dave Weigel? He retweeted some joke. I forget the joke. It was hilarious when I saw it, but I forgot it. I think he's still suspended too, like the world has moved on, but like he retweeted some joke.
This female journalist, whom he had gone to bat for, was just like “Is this an environment where women can feel safe and do our best work?” And it's like, it's retweeting a joke. It's just words on a screen. You can just not look at it.
The hysteria over these kinds of things where you can lose your job, you can be fired, you can be sued. All of this stuff over things that are really kind of not that important. If those kinds of barriers to just guys being themselves weren't present in universities, weren't present in the workplace, even if it is non-physical work, you would find plenty of more men willing to go to university, more men willing to enter the knowledge economy, because they wouldn't feel just totally out off.
Cathy: For every anecdote of workplaces being hostile to men, you've got Matt Lauer having a button on his desk that locks the door to get out from the inside. I'm curious about evidence.
Indian: We can put guys like Matt Lauer in jail.
Cathy: But we don’t. And the question is, is the workplace and education systematically biased against men? One anecdote is not getting done for me. I'd wanna know more about these barriers. Because one journalist getting suspended about a tweet does not convince me.
Indian: I think one of the best contributors to this is Richard Hani. He's spoken about the feminization of society. Tyler Cohen has written about this as well. It's not like you walk into a big tech company and it's just a gaggle of evil HR women saying, “Hey, you gross, man. You better watch it or will fire you” or something. That's not what happens.
But the social decorum that you're forced to follow, the courtesan etiquette that's expected of everyone, the way in which people politic within the workplace, the way actual raw output of good work is viewed as less important than supporting a team or less important than fostering an environment of welcoming or stuff.
Like, what is fostering an environment of blah, blah. What about just doing the work and doing it really well?
I think on some level we just have to be realistic that men and women are not the same. They're not genetically the same. They're not socially the same. Their hormones make them act in different ways. They find each other interesting sometimes, but they don't find each other interesting actually as equals. They find each other interesting as men and as women. There's a polarity between them that becomes fraught in a workplace.
These are rules that we're sort of figuring out. I mean, you can look at a chart of female labor participation in the workforce. And not so long ago, in the 1960s, there are many industries of life, many spheres of life, where it would've been unusual to have unrelated women just around all the time.
So if we're going to be in this environment, if we're going to have this kind of parity, we either need to figure out different rules – Jordan Peterson has made this point – or we need to be kind of realistic. How much can we feminize every last one of our institutions – educational, technical, industrial, financial – and still expect men to be involved or to care about it?
Cathy: Okay. If we also know that high performance is typically a male thing, overrepresented a male thing. Sure. Here's my question now. So what we've seen is that the top men are going to succeed. Let's assume that certain aspects of the workforce have to be more masculine or more feminine. There's a norm and it's hard to be in the middle. You're going to go one way or another. Let's say maybe there is a middle, but neither of us are interested in it. Under a feminized workplace, the top men are gonna succeed no matter what. And the women of all kinds are gonna succeed more as well. So the only people who are really screwed in that situation are middling and low-performing men.
Indian: I don't really think that's true. Do you know who the youth poet laureate of the United States is? Amanda Gorman. Have you seen her poetry? Her poetry is just shit. It's just complete dog shit. It's just, it's really bad. Her last two big publicly posted poems, she clearly doesn't know what a participle is or she's just winging it. There's a typo in one of them. And it's like, come on. What's going on here? When a lot of these institutions sort of get captured by an effort to make them accessible, to make them friendlier to women, et cetera, not only does the quality just degrade, because you've now set a standard for entry that is not quality. Because you're measuring something else, you're gonna get something else. But quality people actually don't wanna stick around. It's true that you get a certain type of man who succeeds in very feminized environments, but are these actually the best men? I'm not so sure.
Maybe actually the kind of man that succeeds in a very feminized environment is just good at gaming feminized environments. That might not be the same actually as just producing really, really high-quality output.
Cathy: And this gets to this question of like – what do we want to see more of is an excellent point and gets to the other part of my question, which is, again, going back to the fact that the economy is likely to demand more labor that is compatible with a more feminized work environment.
Indian: I think that's true. If we just extend out 50 years from now and we say, okay, is it really going to be true that the bonus of testosterone and more muscle mass and greater bone density or whatever is going to be as relevant to the economy as it was in 1920?
No, almost certainly not, because of mechanical automation and computer automation. But is it also going to be true that women are going to want to marry men who have good incomes? Yes. It's also true. And so if the second part of the question is, can't we just normalize a female breadwinner role? I'd say the answer is no, because women are not really wired to want that.
A great example is the tall woman question. Which is why I had that huge thread. Women almost universally have a stated preference for male mates that are significantly taller than them. Men, almost universally have a preference for female mates who are just a little bit shorter than them.
And so they're actually at odds. Typically the way it works out is that really, really tall men are universally desired by women. And really, really short men are universally not desired by women. They're actually found not-so-desirable. And so you have men in the middle.
Height is normally distributed by the way, for both sexes. You have men in the middle who you'll see doing pathetic things. Guys who are 5’11” saying they're six foot on dating apps or whatever. They're really just trying to get through the filters or whatever, but the way it flushes out is basically that when marriages actually do happen, the delta of those differences in spousal also follows a normal distribution.
The water actually finds its level. For those marriages that do happen, the number of marriages is obviously declining, people delay marriage. But those two biologically driven preferences of men and women do actually resolve themselves with almost all male spouses being taller than their female spouses. But just by a little bit, not a huge difference. I use the word tall-girlification to talk about other female preferences. Because if we're talking about female breadwinner models being normalized, well, even very educated women prefer men that earn more than them. This woman has become less tolerant of more of the dating pool. She actually still has this upwards desire for a man that earns more than her. And there are just fewer and fewer men that earn more than her. I think we should grapple with that specifically because it's like, well, can you just invert this biological desire in women to have men that are taller than them and earn more than them?
I don't think you can. If we set society up to such a degree that women have earnings parity, we are inevitably going to have problems. We either need to redistribute wealth to men or we need to just tax women. Like maybe we shouldn't even enter into that scenario in the first place.
Cathy: I kind of hate to leave the question of macroeconomics, but, let's definitely talk about female breadwinners. That's why we're here. Obviously, not everybody agrees, but I believe that to a certain extent, our preferences are a result of nature and nurture. It's very difficult to disentangle, which is which in any particular preference. Probably a preference that is pretty universal over space and time has a biological origin or a biological component or an evolutionary component — a preference for big boobs, small waists, height, these are probably evolved.
But I would argue that something that's also evolved is a female preference for status. There's the beauty/status trade, right? Where traditionally men looked for women who are beautiful and women have traditionally looked for men who have status. Well, I think there's a lot of evidence that, two things, first that this beauty/status trade isn't necessarily as hardwired as we think it is because we see it changing.
We see that most pairings now are fairly assortative, where you're right. Most people still prefer and choose a marriage where the man is slightly more educated and does earn more money. But the difference is narrowing over time. And the second thing I would bring up is that I think what we've seen throughout history and very dependent on context is that the definition of status changes.
And so what marks a man as high status at one place in time doesn't mark him as high status in another place in time. And so I guess I'm curious about why — in a society where male labor is more valuable than female labor, and most men are wage earners, it would make sense to have status be dependent on salary — but in a society in which female labor is more valuable than male labor, I don't know why status would need to continue to be based on salary.
Indian: This is a good point. And it's also true by the way that, I think it was probably Rob Kay Henderson where I saw this, but, he does this lovely thing.
Everyone should follow him on Twitter where he will just post excerpts of books that I might otherwise buy. And then I can just read the excerpts and find the PDFs and not buy them. Thank you, Rob. But yeah, no, men who are firefighters, who don't earn as much as say men who are brain surgeons, are actually probably significantly more desirable to women just on face value for a lot of reasons.
The average man who is a firefighter, just his physical appearance and his body and like all of that. And then think of the average man, let's say he's a quantitative trader. He's a quant. These are two very different kinds of men in the aggregate. For this other guy to be as desirable as this firefighter, he has to kind of appeal to sort of like a long-term (some would say venal), more fore-brained desire on the part of women to have a provider. That's totally true.
But the thing is, a lot of men are actually dropping out of earning entirely. I think there's a threshold of some doership that women will always expect. And if you have more and more men dropping out of earning entirely, because they've just made the decision to just sort of content themselves with video games and porn and not work so hard.
It's gotta be really hard to try and flip status either which way. Because it'll be like, who wants to marry a broke guy? Secondly, it is true that status is not always linked to money. There are a lot of young broke guys who do really, really well with women who are high status in whatever kind of social circle without having that much money.
There are a lot of men who have money who find that it never really quite purchases them status. But what isn't fable and what isn't mutable is that women love men with status. And so if you have an economy and you have a society that is set up to constantly more or less degrade men and promote women, so that women have equal status to men, as often as possible in every institution, in which males can distinguish themselves, you're not gonna have a it's like, look, you just took away the thing that makes men sexy to women. Even if that thing is just like, wow Diego, he cooks a mean broth and he's in this kitchen, just cooking his broth all day.
That's something. Right. Well then if you flood that whole place with women. And women can cook just as well as men too. Well then it's not a sexy thing that the Basque guys are doing anymore. These grizzled fishermen with their pots and pans cooking, you just exploded that.
This is a very annoying tendency of feminism. It's a very annoying tendency of liberalism. Because the core value is just egalitarianism at all costs. We consistently destroy the polarity between men and women, the differentiation between men and women, not just in a physical sense, but also in a status sense, right?
And yet we have these genes and these hormones where men want to do and women want to see. Women want to look upward at this man. They admire, and men want to cherish this frail, tender thing that is a woman. And we just keep taking that away. And then we wonder why things don't work. And it's like, that's why.
Cathy: I think that's a really interesting point. And I think it’s really underappreciated that status is necessarily zero-sum. And that if it is true and eternal that women are attracted to status, then shifting women's status upward, which necessarily means shifting men's status downward, is going to lead to a decrease in pairings. And we are seeing a decline in sex for sure, along with a decline in marriage and childbirth. As I said, I think these questions, these problems, are interrelated.
And so I do think that the loss of status is related to the lack of sex and lack of marriage and yada, yada. I guess what I'm curious about is, can't we redefine status in such a way that comports with economic realities? So status in an environment where demand for male labor is high would be performance in paid labor. Could status for men in an environment where demand for male labor is low look like homemaking, look like domestic care, look like childcare?
Indian: I'll give you the answer and then I'll pose the parallel question. You can't negotiate or game genuine desire. This is not a thing that you can fool people into.
A parallel version of this question was often asked in the early days of the red pill, manosphere by a lot of incels. They were like, how come all of these women like these exciting jocks, these assholes? Why do women like these guys that treat them badly?
Why don't they love me for me? I'm such a nice guy and I'm doing all of these things, how come women don't want that? And it's like, bruh because men are men and women are women. What are you even asking? And a kind of a common thread among all of these incels, I'm actually very sympathetic to them, but these guys who are like a little bit losers posting on the internet is like, well, can't we just like convince the women that actually this big lughead, she shouldn't go out with him?
She should go out with me. And that's not how desire works. That's not how want works. Everyone wants to be wanted. To be wanted is a very lovely, wonderful thing. You can't fool people into that. You can't trick people into that. And I hear what you're saying, where it's like, well, what if we just reorganized society?
What if we just signaled in the culture that these men are actually high status and women, you should be okay with marrying them and men, you should look on these women differently because these women are actually very high value. Your ideas and your instincts about them being low-value aren't true. And it just doesn't work that way. You might as well try to tell the surplus of very, very tall women who can't find a date, Hey, look at all these short guys, these great guys who are really short, that also can't get a date. It's not gonna work. There are many things about tall women that are very nice, namely their legs. But you're not gonna get all of these tall women who can't find a guy to suddenly prioritize short men. Some of them may. It happens occasionally. Dennis Kuchnich’s wife, famously they were this DC couple where you get this 67-year-old gremlin and you get this beautiful, tall redhead. They're married. But it's very rare, because nature is what it is.
Cathy: We've already pointed out that this analogy is quite imperfect because as hardwired, so to speak, as a preference for height may be, an estimation of status is much more malleable. I wouldn't even necessarily say it's malleable as in we mold it, but it is changing.
Indian: It does change, according to you, only in the sense of that those few marriages that are happening, right? Like the marriages that are happening now are basically among very, very high-conscientiousness, educated people. Marriage and fertility are actually disjoint in the United States now. Most births in the United States are now happening out of wedlock.
Most children born in the United States, for some time now, I think it's been true for several decades among African Americans. But among whites and Latinos, the numbers have risen to the point where actually most births are now out of marriage. So you get fertility happening among low-conscientious people and you get marriage happening much more frequently among high-conscientious people.
But the marriage rate, the number of people getting married is very, very small.
[Editor’s (me) note: Marriages per 1000 people have been falling since the 1980’s and fell off a cliff starting in 2016 (I wonder why). But I’m not sure it’s accurate to say “The number of people getting married is very, very small.” Half of US adults were married as of 2016, which is way down since 1960, when that number was 72%. But half is not a very, very small number. And while I think it’s hyperbolic to say that only high-conscientiousness, educated people are getting married, 65% of people with a degree are married vs 55% of those with some college education and 50% among those with just a high school education.]
So it's true that all of these female PhDs, they're getting married to other male PhDs. Clearly this means that women's estimation of men needing to be superior to them is dropping. It's like, no, it's just that PhDs are a very small second of society.
And if they're gonna get married, they're so highly socially assorted through college, through a PhD, through a postdoc that like the only other guys that they know who are single are also PhDs. That's actually what's happening. And more and more women are just not getting married.
I do agree that among those marriages, which still happen, the degree of polarity between a man and a woman in terms of markers of status of income and education are dropping. But in the rest of the world, in the rest of the population, it's just total chaos. Including chaos that is just, frankly, worse for kids because kids do better in a married home. And that's no longer the norm. It's like no longer expected.
Cathy: Okay, well, I still have many questions, but we are running outta time. I would love to schedule a whole nother hour to talk about what I would describe as your slut shaming hypothesis.
Indian: I'm game. I'm game.
Cathay: Awesome. I really appreciate your time. Where can people learn more about you?
Indian: They can learn more about me by going to keeper.dating. I'm putting my effort where my mouth is. We're gonna fix the fertility crisis. We're gonna get people coupled up. They can also find me on Twitter if they search “Indian Bronson” there will be some angry quote tweets and spicy replies. That'll take you right to my profile.
Cathy: Awesome. Thanks so much, Indian. Have a great afternoon.
Indian: You too.
Indian Bronson on native-born men's woes