 Good evening. I figure if the virus doesn't get me, this will. Now, just messing with you. So today I'm going to answer the storm of questions I've received following last night's video about promiscuity. One by one, topic by topic. I'm not going to read the questions. Let's start with romantic jealousy. Romantic jealousy is a form of abandonment or lost anxiety. Brain studies show that even a one-night stand can lead to a full-fledged, emotion-laden love affair or fling. Suspouses are right to be worried about infidelity. Adultery, even the most casual fornication, can lead to a loss of the mate and the disintegration of the couple. But how about emotion-less sex? Just the mechanics. Just the fluids. No bonding, no attachment, no strings. It's definitely possible. In today's environment, in the hookup culture, it's even common. But it is playing with fire, because it can result in a deeper involvement, even in the wake of a single lost-fung consummation. Sex can lead to love exactly as love leads to sex. It's a two-way hormonal thoroughfare. But admittedly, more often intimacy leads to sex, not the other way around. Sex is a mode of communication, bodily way of saying, you make me feel something, you make me feel good, safe, curious, warm, happy, self-confident, confident, desired, empowered, intimate, and affectionate. So I consider emotional affairs to be far more serious threat to the integrity and longevity of a couple than the merely sexual ones. Second question. In the age of smartphones and social media, the potential for infatuation and falling in love with a third party is far more pervasive and greater than the threat of actual physical cheating. Relationships are based on the perceived scarcity of eligible partners. Where will I find another one like him? He's so rare. But transport and communication technologies made possible abundant access to multiple compatible mates, dissolving the very glue that once held couples together. So we have lived in a period of scarcity, no choice, and now we live in a period of abundance, too many choices. But casual sex, sex without intimacy or emotions, is a natural thing. All animals practice it, and the human animal is no exception. So why the righteous brouhaha about it? Well, first of all, there's speciesism. Humans are superior to animals and should never give in to their animal nature, but rather transcend it. It is a form of grandiosity, fostered originally by religious teaching that men is above the animal kingdom. And then there's the issue of conflating and confusing lust and love, emotional intimacy with physical intimacy. Casual sex amounts to masturbating with a body of a nearly anonymous partner, an animated dildo, a sophisticated and unpredictable sex doll, replete with smells and tastes. Casual sex has nothing whatsoever to do with sex in a committed, loving relationship. So we should never conflate lust and love. The third reason we are up in arms with regards to casual sex is that being in love with infatuation itself, being addicted to falling in love, is very common. Some people fall in love with their sexual partners even after a one night stand, and this complicates matters and leads to heartbreak that is best avoided altogether. Remember the movie Fatal Attraction? The only thing that seriously bothers and worries me about casual sex is that it had become the norm, the standard practice hookup culture among people born after 1995. It may, as I've said in earlier videos, this preponderance of casual sex may affect these young people's ability to form meaningful intimate relationships. The jury is still out on this one, but they are growing indications that this is the case. Casual sex definitely predisposes the members of these generations to regard sex as nothing more significant than other bodily functions. It renders them way more prone to cheating, and indeed cheating is dramatically up among both genders. It preconditions them to reckless sexual behaviors, which are also linked to substance abuse. The preponderance of emotionless sex is the problem, not the act itself. Generally, there are numerous myths about casual sex. Men and women react to it exactly the same and they build up to it during the act and in the aftermath. It is not true that they react differently. Casual sex is linked to negative mental health outcomes, but only in certain kinds of people, not in everyone. People who were drunk or drugged during the encounter, people who acted under peer pressure, not autonomy, people with conservative or traditional or religious upbringing, with a moral code in societies with such moreings, people who violate promises, boundaries, rules and vows that they have made to themselves, their own personal integrity, or vows and promises they've made to others, for example in marriage, people who get attached to sex partners, people who develop long-term expectations of a relationship, and people older than 40. All these groups of people are likely to feel very bad after casual sex. These profiles of participants in casual sex are likely to experience shame, embarrassment, guilt, depression, lower self-esteem, anxiety, regret, and memory gaps following the rope, dissociation. All other types of people react with excitement actually with satisfaction and even pride to their affirmed desirability and to the modicum of palliative affection, comfort, attention, acceptance, fleeting intimacy and closeness that is ineluctably involved in voluntary casual sex. So casual sex can be very good for you, therapeutic, but on condition that you don't belong to the groups that I mentioned before. Casual sex allows singles to regulate their sex life, it allows singles to satisfy their curiosity and their need for variety. Still, it invariably involves objectifying the public, that I admit, most true casual sex is near anonymous. In studies we found out that men don't remember almost anything about their female sexual partners. Well over 80% of the information is erased immediately after the encounter. And casual sex is very well demarcated from daily life and from non-casual sex. We all came across the following phenomenon. The morning after a torrid one night stand replete with countless deep French kisses, the man offers his nocturnal partner a tame farewell kiss on the lips and she recoils in horror. What are you doing? Get away from me! But how to account for this ostensibly irrational behavior? Only two hours before, there were French kissing. Why can't he kiss her goodbye on the lips? Because of signaling. French kisses during casual sex are a part of the total physical intimacy engendered during the encounter. But they have no emotional correlate. One night stands essentially amount to using the body of an animate partner, frequently a stranger, to masturbate with. There are zero feelings except maybe some generalized tenderness and a fuzzy affection which dissipate a minute the act is over. In the light of day and out of the purely sexual context, a kiss carries a message. It constitutes a meaningful signal regarding the existence of underlying reciprocated emotional intimacy. It is misleading, it is coercive, it is an intrusion on sacred personal space and therefore it's a form of harassment, even between people who have had sex only two hours before. Every single human action, every gesture, every movement carry multiple context-dependent semiotic connotates and denotates. Sex is no exception. Investing in a relationship has may have become an irrational strategy in this day and age. Prinups make communal property, community property obsolete. Divorce in the not so new is the not so new normal. It's much easier than it used to be. Children are accustomed to divorce. They have learned to expect and accept breakups as an inevitable and preordained part of life. Sex is cost-free. It's been reduced to mutual masturbation, stripped of all its attendant emotional and cognitive components. Hookups and other forms of casual sex as well as pornography rule the day. And so we live in a different world. We live in a world where maybe it's not so rational to invest in a relationship. The pool of available problems is practically infinite. Made selection is no longer affected by scarcity or by the fear of remaining alone. People have become disposable, dispensable and interchangeable. Digital identities on social media and dating apps and dating sites, these are largely fake, we know this. People flood each other with accurate information about the trifling aspects of their lives, but they lie egregiously about all critical issues, from their appearance to STDs. It renders intimacy all but impossible. But why do people have casual sex to start with? Well, I'm going to come back to this issue multiple times during this presentation. But let's start with the basics. Men have casual sex mostly for two reasons. One, the woman makes clear that she's available. Or two, they find the woman attractive. Period. Men make no bones about it. They feel no need to spin complex stories to embed the sex in some exculpatory context. Women have casual sex for dozens of reasons, including, for example, pity or gratitude. Few women admit to having casual sex for its own sake. They all come up with extraneous narratives to justify the copulation, anything from I was drunk to he was nice to me. Why there's difference between the sexes? Women dread being labeled a slot. Still, yes, even in today's world. The yarns that they prefer, these narratives, render the merely carnal more intimate and therefore palatable and socially acceptable. But there is another reason, body image issues. Even the most drop-dead gorgeous woman is somewhat unhappy with her body. This pernicious variant of an inferiority complex and self-devaluation renders women less choosy and leads them to prefer safe, better males who are unlikely to reject them. Attention from the wrong man is still vastly preferable to no attention whatsoever and to rejection by an alpha man. We come to the issue of alpha and beta males and the tectonic shift that has happened recently. So what are the rules of attraction for one night stands? People are either broken and wounded, traumatized, or healthy and functional. We can agree on that. They either have brains, or they have grown, muscles, beauty, or they have both, or they have neither. The wounded and the broken prefer as partners for casual sex safe counterparts who are unlikely to reject them. Non-threatening pickups. People with no brains, and no brawn, and no beauty. The healthy and the functional select mates for casual sex which possess either, who possess either brawn or beauty. And that's usually for a single role in the hate. People with brains, or only brains, or people with brains and brawn and beauty. People who have brains are very unlikely to be chosen as casual sex partners. They're likely to exert attraction. People, I mean, people are going to be attracted to, some people are attracted to intelligent people, but very rarely as casual sex partners. Picking someone highly intelligent is a deterrent. You have to be on your toes. You have to shine. You have to compete. You have to risk humiliating rejection if you do not measure up. Anxiety, narcissistic injuries, and depletion are often the only rewards of trying to mate with an intelligent person. If you have only brains and zero brawn or beauty, the potential mate has to be a sapure sexual, and must be exposed to your cerebral chance over an extended period of time in order to overlook the unappetizing rest of you and to consent to have sex. So that's why people who are only intelligent very rarely have casual sex. Chances of that happening, chances of being exposed to your cerebral charms, chances of being exposed to your intelligence in a world of attention deficits, in a world of media imagery of bodily perfection, in today's world of instant gratification, the chances are slim to none. Most nerds and geeks end up being incense in voluntary celibates. They rarely get late, if ever. In the near past, until the 1960s and 1970s, people spend time with each other. They spend a lot of time with each other. And so someone with intelligence was able to impress, attract, convert, groom potential partner. In today's world, it's a world of speed dating. It's a world of swiping to the left. It's a world of dating apps. And people who have only intelligence don't stand a chance in such a world, because there's not enough time to be exposed to what they have to offer. Multiple studies have shown that women have one-night stands for two main reasons. One, emotional connection and support. And two, the men's personality. The men had been nice to them, was interesting, or had been perceived by them as an exciting bad boy. Men have one-night stands for mainly one reason. The woman made herself available. Men are opportunistic. More in-depth studies demonstrated that the men merely masturbated with and in the woman's body, masturbatory aid. After the act, virtually none of the men recalled details about the woman, not even her full name in many cases. Only 20% of men studied said that they would not have sex with a heavily drunk woman, though a majority of the men in these 20% admitted to having done it actually in the past. Perhaps because they interpret the woman's heavy drinking as preparation for sex. Women admitted in studies that sometimes they get drunk in order to overcome inhibition and to pave the way for sex. Women need to get drunk to have casual sex if they perceive themselves as doing something wrong, acting slottish or cheating on their partner. Women also drink in order to bed a stranger if they are overly shy, typically owing to a body image problem, somatophone problem, or if they have deficient social skills. Alcohol helps one to socialize. Alcohol makes the alcoholic or the drinker more sociable, more gregarious. 45% of men said that they preferred casual sex to all other forms of sex, and this may be the influence of pornography. Most men regarded the time that they had spent with a woman before the one night stand, however brief, as an investment, something they had to do reluctantly because women demanded it as socially acceptable pretext and an excuse to copy it. The men would have much preferred simply to get on with it, but they knew that they had to talk to the woman, pay attention to her, woo her, pay an interest in empathy, court her, and go through all these motions, pretending to have interest in her before she would give in. For what qualities in a man ask the youth, does a woman most ardently love him? For those qualities in him replied the old tutor, which his mother most ardently hates, and this is a book without a title by George Jean Natan, Nathan, 1918. Women look for five qualities in men for a long-term relationship. One, good judgment, two, intelligence, but not too intelligent. Recent studies have shown that women prefer men with 120 IQ to men with 140 IQ. They identify high IQ as a form of madness, actually. Also, they feel that they have to compete and that they are being tested. So, for long-term relationship, women are looking for good judgment, average high intelligence, 100, 120, but no more. Faithfulness, affectionate behavior, financial responsibility, and we're with them. Women look for 10 qualities in a male partner for casual sex or for a sexual affair. One, nice body, but not too muscular. Two, has money and is not stingy. Three, kindness. Four, interested in them, finds them interesting. Five, sexually desires the woman and shows it with flirting or small touches, but not aggressively. Six, protective, but not possessive or jealous. Seven, attentive, puts the woman and her needs at the center of attention, doesn't overshadow her, doesn't compete with her, doesn't ignore her, of course. Number eight, has a sense of humor. Number nine, loves life, finds people interesting, knows to have a good adventurous time, fun, quick to socialize. Number ten, easygoing, not brooding, not overly serious, not nerdy, not too intelligent, not too scholarly. That's boring. That's a turn-off. Men seem to place a premium on these five qualities in women for all purposes, long-term relationship or casual sex. One, physical attractiveness and sexual availability. Two, good naturedness. Three, faithfulness. Four, protective affectionateness. And five, dependability. Many people ask me about alpha males and beta males. Alpha males are winners, people who are leaders, get things done, highly educated, very high income, you know, the winners in life. And beta males are either losers or very nice guys who are not getting anywhere in life. So it seems that beta male losers get laid more often actually than alpha male winners, because women frequently select beta male losers for casual sex. Nice guys are safe. They do not threaten the woman with any prospect of long-term attachment or relationship. They make few demands and they are pliable. They are compliant one-night sexual and dating partners. It's someone to have drinks with, chat, socialize with, have sex for with a while and then discard without giving these disposable men a second thought. Women are far more likely to have sex on a first date with a beta male. Someone they want to use only once. They would hesitate to have sex on a first date with a socially superior and more accomplished variant. If they see an alpha male, they automatically think about a long-term relationship and one of the worst signals a woman can give if she's looking for a long-term relationship is to be sexually available on a first date. As women adopt hitherto exclusively male sexual behaviors, more race and traits, women become more promiscuous. Recent studies have revealed that women have almost as many one-night stands 4.3 as men 6. Cheating among women in committed relationships also tripled over the past 50 years. Research shows that women younger than 40 prefer men as I said with 120 IQ points or fewer to men with 140 IQ points or higher. They also find overconfidence in men extremely off-putting. This is a major upheaval in gender roles and intergender power politics. Only 40 years ago when we have conducted studies in the 1980s, women still overwhelmingly opted for winners and for what we call today jerks. It was in line with a trend as old and established as humanity itself. Women always looked for winners, money makers, leaders, accomplished people, super intelligent men. This has changed in the past 20 or 30 years and now they are looking for safe men. Men they came to some extent feel superior to. Numerous recent studies demonstrated this tectonic shift as women become way more narcissistic and I would say psychopathic. As they become empowered in multiple ways, they prefer weaker, feminized, effeminate mates, both as sexual partners and in romantic diets. And how are men reacting? Well, many an increasing number of men is giving up on women. Mektau, men going their own way, red pillars, insoles, within the manosphere. These are social movements which are essentially either or misogynistic, woman hating, and they are going their own way. They want to, as a maximum, use women for casual one night stands, but no commitment, no sharing, no attachment, no relationship, nothing. And a minority of men are giving up women and resorting to other men for intimacy and sex. I don't think it's an accident that homosexuality, homoeroticism, same-sex attraction, and men having sex with men, MSM, have mushroomed, or actually I don't want to say the word exploded, but mushroomed definitely, year on year all over the world. This is not only the outcome of gay practices becoming more acceptable. In my view, this is because there are no women left in the traditional sense of the inversion in the gender roles, created gender vertigo, gender dysphoria, and men are intimidated by this. They don't know how to act. They're not programmed properly, as are women, same problem with women. Women dress like men, they curse like men, they drink like men. They are as promiscuous and aggressive in sex as men. They're as narcissistic, even I would say psychopathic, as disempathic as many men. They cheat on their spouses and intimate partners at the same rate as men do. They have become primary breadwinners, at least 43% of families, households. They are taking over many traditional blue color and white color male vocations. Women are single mothers. They're better educated than men. 60% of all college graduates are women. So it's a world that has become unigender. They're only men with different genitalia, men with penises and men with vaginas. They're not women. So some men go for the original. Why opt for an imitation? Freud predicted all this mayhem inadvertently, when he described penis envy. He said that women feel incomplete without the male appendage and unconsciously try to emulate men. It was very prescient of him. But what even Freud could not have predicted is the convergence of gender roles, the resulting gender vertigo. In a world without women, homosexuality is an increasingly rational choice. The genitalia are familiar. The emotions and reactive patterns are clearer and more predictable. Tolerance is higher and mutual expectations way more realistic and thus much easier to gratify. Communication is a lot better. So it's a very appealing package for many men. A disclaimer, I'm 100,000 million percent heterosexual. So I'm not promoting homosexuality in any way. I'm just describing social trends as I see them. Consequently, men are ignoring and discarding women in droves and in a variety of ways. Most women now go without the men for years at a time. Most women are reduced to picking up strangers in bars for one-night stands as for intimacy. Intimacy and sex are inseparable, even in a casual one-night stand. The greater the emotional intimacy, the more expressive and meaningful the sexual intimacy. But there are people for whom sex and intimacy are mutually exclusive. When they are bonded and attached to the partner, they cannot make love to her, and they have sex only with relative strangers within shallow, fleeting relationships. These dysfunctional and hurtful folks perceive intimacy as a threat, and they perceive sex as a dirty act within a power play of dominance and submission. To have sex with a loved one is to denigrate her, to demean her, to defile her, to treat her as a slut, to contaminate her, to make love to an intimate partner is to hand over power and to be inevitably wounded and hurt when dumped or abandoned. So they abstain and they cheat. Ultimately, these emotional cripples end up in dead-end marriages or sexless marriages or as loners, and they are reduced to barcrolling to find equally inebriated sexual partners. As age takes its toll, these people totally withdraw incapable of even the most rudimentary tasks of psychosexual companionship. Leave a break. Yummy. What about feminism? It has its limits. There's a book out called The Billion Wicked Thoughts, which I can't recommend enough. It is a study of one billion search terms, keywords, used in Google searches connected to sex, sexuality. They discovered that even the most militant feminist, even the most emancipated career woman, is at heart submissive, a medieval princess, awaiting for the night in shining armor for the modern equivalent, the rescuer, to awaken her from her solitary slumber. To carry sexual favor with women, let alone gain emotional access and leverage to them, men have to withstand the onerous tests of courtship and mating rituals. Men have to act attentive, courteous, fawning but not too overtly, desirous but not too vulgarly, always available and almost single-mindedly obsessed with their quarry at all times. This ostentatious dedication, the breathless pursuit and relentless chase, they serve a few evolutionary goals. Mainly, this obstacle course provides the woman with invaluable information about the qualities of the eligible male as a protector, as a provider, as a potential husband and a father in the long-term. Is he persistent? Is he reliable? Is he resilient? A patient hunter, committed, devoted, besotted, sexual? Does he strategize cleverly? Is he willing to fend off other encroaching males? Is he competitive, assertive, supportive, emotive and so on? It is a form of virtual signaling. These evolutionary imperatives and reflexes are ingrained and they are at play even in one-night stands or during casual sex. Women often end up bedding men they consider wrong or even repulsive, the morning after, precisely because millions of years of nature took over and trumped education, nurture, environment and societal mores. A slim minority of heterosexual psychopathic narcissists shun casual sex in one-night stands because they feel objectified by the women's counterparts and they abhor the equipotence, they abhor the power symmetry inherent in casual sex. These psychopathic narcissists are mildly sadistic. They need to dominate the female, they need to humiliate her, they need to reduce her to unthinking submission brought on by unrequited and tantalizing craving and then they need to make her act in ways that she would find shameful, hurtful, denigrating and guilt-inducing and so obviously none of these can be accomplished in a brief almost anonymous encounter. Grooming requires time, effort, careful planning, preparations, brainwashing, repeated exposure, it takes time, you can't do much in two or three hours. Contrary to misinformation online, cerebral narcissists abhor casual sex for several psychodynamic reasons. First, it is casual sex is perceived as aimless, no acquisition, only momentary sex. The fact that the female wants no further contact after the sexual encounter is a severe narcissistic injury, challenging the narcissist grandiose sense of uniqueness and addictive resistibility. Ironically, the cerebral is as faithful as they come owing to this confluence of aforementioned factors. We have reached a situation in our societies, in our civilization, that sex is too meaningless to feature in our meaningful relationships. We prefer to live sex, we prefer to do other things in our relationships, we prefer to talk, to cuddle, to travel, to watch movies, to create things together, raise children maybe. We reserve sex for one-night stands, for hookups, for strangers, when we are in between significant matters and intimate partners or when we cheat. This is fast becoming the new normal. Sex is what you do when you are out of a committed couple. Sex is emotionless, mechanical, masturbatory, often hurried and consummated when under the influence. The sex partners are nearly anonymous and they are discarded after one or two encounters. They are like toilet paper. Sexlessness is surging uncontrollably, even as the rates of casual sex soar uncontrollably. There seems to be a disconnect, a yawning abyss between intimacy and recreative though not procreative sex, once thought to be the inseparable flip sides of a coin of togetherness. So sexlessness in marriage, sexlessness in committed relationships, coupled with casual sex when the partner is not watching. Some people, especially women, are far more likely to try to attempt to realize their sexual fantasies with a stranger in casual sex than with a long-term partner for a serious date. You see, you can afford to be sexually daring, adventurous, kinky, experimental and sluggish with someone you are unlikely to ever meet again, to ever see again, with someone whose opinion and judgment are of no importance to you, no consequence to you, with a nobody. Ironically, partners in a one-night stand may end up having more memorable sex, experimental sex or even love-making than anything their conjugal bed can ever offer. Casual sex is a part of a bigger phenomenon. Of course, it's a social trend and therefore it's part of the entire dynamics, entire set of dynamics of society, entire social fabric. Men and women born after 1995 maintain what I call an intimacy cloud. Their marriage partner, their committed relationship partner is only one among a few and sometimes not even a privileged one, not even a unique one. In these post-modern arrangements within the hookup culture, the intimate partners, the spouses compete for the time, resources and access to sex of their mates. They have to compete with work colleagues, same-sex friends, friends with benefits, opposite-sex friends, former old flames, schoolmates have been and wannabe lovers and other denizens of the intimacy cloud with whom close and recurrent meaningful contact is maintained throughout the life of the primary couple. So today, in a marriage or committed relationship, the marriage or committed relationship is only one relationship among many and all of them are of equal power. Your wife is as likely to have sex with you if she finds the time and the resources and provides you with access as she has with her work colleague, with her say with her friend, good friend with an old flame she met on Facebook with a schoolmate with a lover. She has a cloud of intimates, not cloud of partners, not a single one. Increasingly, even sexual and dating exclusivity are challenged by the members of these young generations. A full 3% now openly profess to regarding their boyfriend, their girlfriend or their spouse is just another intimate or sex partner among many. Many, many of them date other people frequently and see nothing wrong with it. See nothing wrong for example spending the whole night in someone's apartment while married. Another 10 to 15% are in consensual open relationships, 21% are in sexless diets. Consequently among young men and women in committed primary relationships, behaviors either too considered egregious misconduct have exploded, even quadrupled in incidents, adultery, casual sex one night stands, getting drunk or high with a friend and then sleeping over. He's like a brother to me, he's not a man. All nighter solitary bar hopping, traveling on holidays with someone other than the ostensibly main intimate partner. I'm kidding you know, people go on holidays and vacations with a member of the opposite sex. He's a good friend, he's like a brother to me, she's like a sister to me, there'll never be sex between us. Chatting, picking up total strangers in restaurants and pubs, sharing drinks or even a hotel room with unknown people, people who've never met before. This is known as crashing. Similar non monogamous manifestations about intimacy is such a primordial and basic need that when deprived of it for for long periods of time people are driven to despotence and they seek substitutes even in small doses. This may explain the preponderance and the increase in casual sex. Indeed intimacy cloud which is now common among literally all the members of the younger generations used to be a feature of certain personality disorder. As late as 10 years ago histrionic narcissistic women maintained a stable of men from their past. Eggs and wannabe lovers who were now friendzoned, spiderweb wrapped until they are needed. So a stable of men was the hallmark of a histrionic or a narcissistic or psychopathic woman. Today every woman under a certain age has it, has this. When the histrionic goes through a rough patch or a breakup in her primary relationship with an intimate partner she reaches out to these hapless white knights to rescue her and to afford much needed succor, mostly emotional and but also sexual. Thus reactivated and reanimated these men serve to restore and boost the histrionic's flagging self-esteem as well as echo and affirm her self-justifying self-righteous self-serving and alloplastic victimhood narratives. Generally speaking friendzoning is a cruel manipulative technique. It holds out the false hope of more sex romantic relationship while extracting from the target an endless stream of benefits. The histrionic narcissistic queen bee or princess spends time with her courtiers, shares with her men intimate details of her dalliances with other men, consumes their resources fully aware of the excruciating hurt that this causes them. Their finding pain and frustrated yearning constitute her narcissistic supply. The histrionic woman, narcissistic woman, psychopathic woman maintains, maintain these men in her orbit by throwing them morsels of one night non-penetrative sex by feigning fake romance. This keeps them on their toes, keeps them coming back for more. Pavlovian retches always on the lookout for the big break when she will finally relent and realize that they could be so much more than mere brothers and embark on a full-fledged love affair with them. So all these were behaviors typical of narcissists, histrionic and psychopathic women but today these are very very common behaviors. I would say that the vast majority of women under a certain age, maybe 40, maybe 35, they behave exactly this way, absolutely exactly this way. They friends on some men, they keep other men in a cloud and they violate exclusivity and monogamy extremely frequently in a variety of ways, not necessarily sexual. Instant intimacy, fake intimacy, simulated intimacy, and transient intimacy are all widely preferred to no intimacy at all, hence the skyrocketing incidence of casual sex and the pervasiveness of dating, cheating apps. Intimacy with anyone whatsoever is vastly better than no intimacy whatsoever. When start for intimacy people cheat, deceive themselves, they con themselves into shared psychosis with other people. They abuse substances to dull their senses and remove inhibitions. They somatize intimacy, they use, they sexualize intimacy, they use sex to feel intimate. They reframe intimacy, for example by joining cults or reference groups. In extreme cases of recurring failures to generate intimacy, people resort to self-intimacy, solipsistic and schizoid attempt to become their own best friends and companions in lieu of the frustrating objects out there. And self-intimacy, this self-intimacy glorifies aloneness within an ideology of personal autonomy, agency, and self-sufficiency. The self-intimate people interpret feeling lonely and the need for significant others as weaknesses of character. They zealously castigate, both feeling lonely and needing others as forms of social control, chauvinism, patriarchy, feminism, or pathological self-delusion. Narcissistic self-intimates conflate separateness with uniqueness and accomplishment. And so it's very easy to understand why a lot of casual sex, many casual sex encounters are meaningless. It is not only the sex that is meaningless, in the lives of these people, everything is meaningless. Sex is meaningless. They have no aspirations, no hopes, no plans. They hold themselves to be meaningless. They don't take themselves as meaningful. And of course they can't take anyone else as meaningful, any interaction with anyone else as meaningful. Nothing is meaningful. It's a world that's a universe of meaninglessness. It's of my insight. The first to point it out was, collectively, in his masterpiece, The Mask of Sanity, Carpenter and others, people have reached the situation that they fear intimacy, because intimacy challenges this meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is a default state. In many ways, it's the easy life. It's to be a slacker. It's to be a beach boy. It's to pass through life as an eternal holiday or vacation. People who fear intimacy are mirror images of those with healthy attachment styles. They react with rage and defiance to any attempt to love them, to care for them, to get to know them by inching closer to them, by becoming part of their lives, integral part of their lives. These people dread commitment, dread stability, hate predictability, sharing, planning, collaboration, support. They resent and reject all this, sometimes aggressively, hurtfully. And these people are exactly the ones who prefer casual sex to any longer term arrangement. They avoid deep emotions, they avoid involvement, they undermine anybody's intimacy by distancing themselves, social distancing, intimate distancing, by absenting themselves emotionally or physically. These people lie, they confabulate, they engage in passive-aggressive, outright-aggressive, reckless, self-destructive behaviors, which are so devastatingly hurtful to significant others that no relationship can survive it. And that's the aim to undermine and destroy relationships. But the very same people who dread intimacy, the very same people who render it impossible with their behaviors, when they are rejected or abused, they disintegrate. They overeat, they abuse substances. A small minority of these people mediate with sex. So, for example, women would self-medicate with men, self-soothe with men. They hook up with friends, former flades, or even strangers, for some good time, for some sex. It helps them to restore their self-esteem, to regulate or dull their negative emotions, to buttress their femininity, to stabilize their labile sense of self-worth. Intimacy, however transient and limited, even if merely physical, does wonders to their assertiveness and resilience. In some cases such contact involves defiant, in-your-face rage, a kind of ostentatious cheating on the intimate partner. You see, they replace the real deal, the real McCoy, the real intimacy, the echt intimacy. They replace it with Erzatz intimacy, the kind of knockoff, knockoff intimacy variant, which is casual sex. Casual sex gives the illusion, especially if you're under the influence of this alcohol, casual sex gives the illusion of intimacy, but coupled with no commitment. Such misconduct, ostentatious cheating, ostentatious casual sex, or what's called in the literature purposeful infidelity, has three other goals which I didn't mention yesterday. One is to hurt, cause excruciating pain and grievously and often publicly offend and humiliate the rejecting or abusive party. The second reason is to elicit a reaction, any reaction, from the indifferent and dismissive spouse or mate, usually via triangulation. And the third reason is to win points in a never-ending power play of one upmanship and brinkmanship between the misbehaving person and her spouse, her date, her boyfriend, boyfriend, girlfriend. Again, when it's women, the women who default to this kind of choice are able to engage in emotionless and casual sex and are often histrionic, the female variant of psychopathy, according to the latest thinking in the field, histrionic or borderline. They lack impulse control. They suffer from emotional dysregulation, which is again common amongst borderlines, but also among trauma victims with extreme CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder. And all this is embedded, as I said, in social trends. This is the era of the stranger. We confide in and sleep with total unknown people, often preferring passing intimacy to the real, deeper abiding thing, long-term thing. Modern cheap means of transportation and communication coupled with technologies such as dating apps and social media, conspire to erode meaningful, long-term relationships and to favor liaisons, flings and dalliances. Casual sex was made visible with contraception and women's sleep empowerment, especially in higher education in the workplace. Institutions which were predicated on profound and growing intimacy, these institutions are doomed. The angst and we and atomized loneliness of modern existence, together with, in cahoots with, multiple triggers of anxiety and depression, these put together undermine any attempt to forge enduring bonds with significant others. Attachments are perceived as threatening, they invariably resolve into hurt. Pain aversion keeps people apart, renders interactions superficial and minimal, keep it shallow, keep it on the surface, don't get hurt. Society, community and family are things of the past. Solidarity is dead. We are left to fend off for ourselves, each to and on his or her own. The pandemic only emphasizes this. So we live in this world. In our fanatic and anomic civilization, we prefer the inanimate to the living, material goods to people, controlled indolence and restricted existence to the fully actualized and thoroughly socialized alternatives. Our lives are constricted. We regress and recede to existential loneliness, which in turn gives rise to heightened angst, anxiety and we and depression. We self-medicate, we assuage our acute discomfort with a fetishized pornography of objects via ritualized consumption and the pornography of bodies via casual sex, the dual pornography, the pornography of objects, the pornography of bodies, and what are bodies in casual sex if not objects? We objectify everything. Death, death, death is our final yet unacknowledged destination and we are drawn to it and we explore it in our art, in our culture, in our imaginaries and practices. We're in inexorable fascination, see the rise of the horror film or the crime yarn. But we equally try to manage the terror of our finality by feigning immortality through objectifying people and anthropomorphizing objects. Objects came alive, people became objects. Gradually, we end up treating ourselves as specimen and our lives as laboratory experiments mortified by our ubiquitous isolation. To self soothe, we retreat deeper into our tormented souls and minds until the pain is so unbearable that we disintegrate and we act out our worst nightmares, until we become our very instruments of self-torture and self-destruction, until we dissipate and there is no escape, nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide. You see confronted with ourselves, we are no more. These are not fringe phenomenon, these are not minor issues. Fully 91% of both men and women equate sexual exclusivity in a committed relationship with dating exclusivity, not dating others, no sex acts with others. But this is only on paper. Very big groups deviate from this when we cut it across ages, when we splice it by age, we discover that most of this has to do with people older than 35 years and of course as usual there are narcissists and psychopaths and they enforce a one-sided deal. They provide no commitment, no exclusivity and they expect both commitment and exclusivity in return. They lead double, triple lives and within the couple they upset themselves and they withhold affection and sex. The rise of narcissism among men led to a corresponding surge of similar traits and misbehaviors among women in their attempt to adapt to the new environment and cope with it. Women are becoming more and more psychopathic, I said it many times. The misconduct typical of a borderline is indistinguishable from the emotional dysregulation, modulability and psychopathic behaviors and grandiosity of a victim of CPTSD. Histrionic, narcissistic, psychopathic borderline personality disorder used to be rare among women and now they are all over. Witness for example the tripling of adultery rates and the quadrupling of casual sex encounters among women of all age groups since the 1970s as well as a tidal wave of female defined and anti-social psychopathic incidents. Women are adopting either too exclusive narcissistic and psychopathic male mores, I said it yesterday, male behaviors. Women are emulating bad guys rather than nice guys because women feel eminently threatened and heartbroken. It is a narcissistic psychopathic jungle out there so women say better be the predator than the prey and we of both sexes and all genders we have completed the transition from a world of praying to a reality of praying. Casual sex with strangers, one-night stands, stranger sex, sometimes such an encounter devolves into extreme humiliation and even outright infliction of pain. These outlier experiences could fulfill either of several psychological functions. One, experimenting with novelty without the risk of being judged and without caring about the sex partner's opinion. The absence of long-term consequences and future reminders, it is after all a one-time encounter. Well, the absence of having to meet the partner again and the absence of long-term consequences they encourage sexual daring, experimentation and openness and they result in trying out kink and other forms of so-called deviant or so-called perverted sex. With regards to women by picking an inferior or low life bar and then allowing him to use her body with not constraining rules or boundaries, women actually are self-trashing, they're self-punishing, they're self-depreciate, they're self-devaluing, self-destructing. They uphold their self-perceptions as bed and worthy, dumb, defiled slut where there is a rejecting and abusive intimate partner in the picture. It is a way of saying I'm devaluing your property and rendering myself a whore so that you have a whore, not a valuable woman. That there is the issue of restoring one's self-esteem via the others out of control bestial desire, the more extreme the sex acts, the more carnally irresistible, the violated or raped or humiliated party feels. Indeed, that's precisely the reason. About 20% of women have persistent rape fantasies. The rape implies that the other party to the sex has lost control. The woman is so irresistible that he had to rape. Sex with unknown and therefore potentially dangerous partners is oddly palliative. The fight, freeze, phone or fight response required to survive the night distracts from and ameliorates overwhelming and dysregulated negative emotions such as depression, disappointment and anger. Put simply, if you are with a dangerous partner in a hotel room, you forget about your depression, your anger, your disappointment, your anxiety, only want to survive the night. Men choose a casual sex partner based on one of three parameters, I said it before, opportunity, availability and visual cues. Women go through a whopping 39 criteria before they agree to copulate. This is why women may end up having one night stands even with ugly, junky bum losers. They saw, they see something in you. In other words, he passed some of the 39 tests. Women's sexuality is plastic. A woman will have sex with the men she pities or out of gratitude or because he's intelligent, funny, kind, interesting, attentive, finds her irresistible, pleasant to be around. It's a list of 39 items long. Similarly, the mate selection, the mating algorithm is different between men and women. Men first feel carnally attracted and are then driven to act on their lust. Women's bodies react exactly as men's blood flows to all the right places, but they consciously experience arousal only after they have decided to sleep with the men. In other words, there's a disconnect between the woman's brain and her genitalia. Things are happening in the genitalia, blood flow lubrication, that the mind is not aware of at all and therefore is not aroused. A woman becomes aroused only after the men had been vetted by passing some of the 39 aforementioned exam points. Different evolutionary paths account for this disperse. Nature encourages men to be promiscuous, encourages women to think twice. Reproductive strategies reflect the anticipated investment of scarce resources. Even in post-modern societies, women are the ones who get stuck with a bill, pregnancy, child rearing. So, when people say it was meaningless sex, she or he meant nothing to me. That's a stock response of cheating men and increasingly women. I personally always found this an odd reassurance, obviously offensive actually. It only makes matters worse. It only hurts even more. To start with, there's no such thing as meaningless sex. There's no such animal as meaningless sex. Sex, even the casual sort, with a virtual stranger after two minutes, always has sex, always has some intimate and emotional psychosexual background. I don't know, there's mutual affection exchange, there's gratitude expressed, there's self-esteem, esteem buttressed, there's pity, there's protectiveness felt, attraction articulate, smells and tastes enjoyed, support given, exuberance, possessiveness and often hopes and expectations arouse. But far more importantly, if the other party really meant nothing to you and the sex was that irrelevant, that meaningless, why did you risk devastating your significant other without any value? If it meant nothing to you, why do it to start with? If it had no value for you and it had a lot of value for your devastated partner, why not refrain? Surely the happiness and well-being of your intimate partner, intimate life partner, more is matters more, matter more than an orgasm with a non-entity. It's a very strange excuse, it meant nothing to me, it was meaningless, he's a nobody. What if he's a nobody, if it meant nothing to me, why did you do it? You knew the effect it would have on the partner and you still went ahead. I mentioned, perhaps a clue is the fact that I mentioned before that there is a tectonic shift in mate selection preferences among humans. As women become more independent, grandiose and entitled, they adopt behaviors hitherto associated exclusively with psychopathic men. They also opt for better males, weak, tame, dependent, underaccomplished, less intelligent and less handsome men. They choose these men as sexual and romantic partners for a single encounter. This is accompanied by a revolution in sexual and behavioral signaling, as the semantics and the semiotics of types of social conduct are reversed for the first time since the inception of the agricultural revolution and urbanization thousands of years ago. No wonder feelings of dislocation and disorientation regarding gender roles, gender vertical, are so high, so rampant. Drinking, smoking, the loud use of profane language, defiance, promiscuity, novelty, risk and thrill seeking, avoidant attachment, impulsiveness, masculine attire, masculine body building, little makeup, little grooming, overt seductiveness and flirtatiousness, abuse of multiple substances, recklessness, loss of control in public, petruousness, frequent changes of partners in interpersonal relationships. These until the 1960s, this list until the 1960s, these were the negative hallmarks of a mentally disturbed or desperate, bad news woman best avoided. They were also the hallmarks of highly dysfunctional, disorganized and chaotic, possibly psychopathic men. Actually, I took this list from Cleckley's book, 1942, the first book that dealt deeply with the issue of the psychopath. And most of the book is dedicated to psychopathic males. But today, these very same character traits and behaviors that used to belong to easy women and to psychopathic men. These character traits and behaviors, they render women a woman more attractive because they indicate to men her sexual availability, her personal autonomy, emancipated mindset, strength, financial well-widdled, absence of demanding neediness or long-term expectations and fun-loving ambience. In other words, what these traits and behaviors signal to men is, come hither, I'm available for sex and I'm going to ask nothing of you. I may even pay. In this hookup age of ubiquitous, antisocial or asocial narcissism and atomization, schizoid loneliness is a way of life. In this day and age, such women are treasured and courted assiduously by emasculated men, usually for the casual sex and non-committal, non-relationships that have come to typify our dystopian, postmodern, fanatic materialistic world. One break. The common wisdom when I was growing up was that as men get older, they have a greater number of potential partners. This is age hypergamy. In other words, the older I grow, the more women are accessible to me. When I'm 20, I can access women who are younger than 20 and some women who are older than 20, but when I'm 60, I can access women younger than 60, younger than 50, younger than 40, younger than 30, even younger than 20. So there's a whole much bigger selection available to me, the older I get as a man, and this is age hypergamy. As women age, exactly the opposite happens. They have a shrinking pull of possible mates. This is age hypergamy. This evolutionary asymmetry had always had profound social implications. It affected the structure of our societies, as well as our institutions and the ways that these function, both formal, codified, mores, norms, and laws, and informal. All this is beginning to change for the first time since the agricultural revolution thousands of years ago. Women are emancipated sexually. They are independent financially. They're gradually taking over the reins. They are adopting hitherto exclusively masculine, even defiantly anti-social behaviors, including ones pertaining to mate choice and selection. So we have mills. We have cougars. Sex hypergamy is the new normal. Women prefer to stay single, childless, wedded to their careers, and self-actualization, as they sleep only with better, weak, emasculated men, usually in hookups or short-term relationships. Our dystopian reality is uni-gender. It is a world without women, only two types of men, as I said. Sex hypergamy, a preference for accomplished strong alpha males, even for casual sex, is out of the window. It's not fashionable anymore. Women want to be on top in every possible way, and strong men are a threat. Strong men are competition. Strong men are a challenge and a potential for narcissistic injury. So red pill is a right about the 80-20 Pareto principle. 80% of women do want to sleep with only 20% of all men. But I think the red pill has got the 20% wrong. Women want to copulate with the 20% who are better males, not alpha males. Women assiduously avoid the intimidating and challenging alpha men, whose success and prowess constitute an unbearable narcissistic injury to the competitive, independent female. I'm a bit old-fashioned, you could tell from the text. I do believe that gender roles, inculcated over millennia, had some very positive aspects and functions. I think when women were egregiously mistreated by men, they were enslaved. It was horrible what was done to women. Absolutely horrible. And I'm delighted that they had succeeded to emancipate themselves and to liberate themselves. No thanks to men. There was a fight involved, starting with the suffragettes 150 years ago. So women made it, and they are still making it. For example, the Me Too movement. And I'm happy, the playing field is leveled, and I'm happy they have equal access. I hope they will end up having equal wage, equal representation, and so on and so forth. Women have a lot to contribute to this world, possibly even more than men in today's environment. But I still think it's a pity that we had sacrificed gender roles so completely, so soon, and without thinking it through. It's very similar to what we're doing with the COVID-19 pandemic. It's an off-the-cuff reaction to a gut feeling, the two worst ways of making decisions. I regard sex by women and men as fundamentally different experiences. The word penetration is an aggressive male chauvinistic word. It refers to the woman as a territory to be probed, invaded, and conquered. Men are as much engulfed and digested by women as they pierce women. So why not say engulfment instead of penetration? It's a male's point of view. With a single exception of rape, the woman has to invite the sex partner in. She has to welcome the sex partner. Warmly, she has to bathe him in her unique libation. She has to guard his liquid method in herself. The woman is a host, and the man is a guest in her shrine. Even in casual sex, the woman gives access to her essence from the inside. Even a one-night stand implies a modicum of intimacy, closeness, naked vulnerability, and total trust between the woman and her sex partner. At least as much friendly confidence is between a hostess and her guest who she invites to the most shielded private recesses of her home. Nothing less. This is why cheating by his female intimate partner is such a disproportionately devastating blow to the cheated heterosexual men from which he never fully recovers. The women are far less impacted by the sexual physical aspects of their partner's infidelity, precisely because the anatomy is different. When a woman gives consent, it is more pronounced, it is explicit, proactive, significant, well, unintended, deeper. And another thing is that both having free choice and maintaining meaningful relationships provoke angst, anxiety, or dread. But they provoke anxiety and dread only in broken, damaged, traumatized, or mentally ill people. The existential crisis is further exacerbated to unbearable proportions and intolerable levels by rejecting an abusive partner. So if there is a broken, damaged, traumatized, or mentally ill person and his partner is abusive or rejecting, it becomes utterly intolerable. The resulting pain leads to decompensation, to reckless self-destructive and self-trashing acting out. Such people, often on a sudden impulse, team up with rogue, dangerous, psychopathic, and predatory counterparts as instruments of personal doom and self-mutilation for one night or longer. Egregious misbehavior is irresistible in such circumstances, because it fulfills multiple critical psychological goals and needs. Apart from self-debasement and self-punishment, such casual sex also provides a results-empathic intimacy from the new partner, kind of improvised knock-on empathy. It serves as a signaling function, a cry for help, a beacon of distress, intended to elicit a reaction, any reaction, from the incalcitrant significant other. Post-traumatized people have zero tolerance for uncertainty. The intimate partner's approach avoidance and intermittent reinforcement, abuse, love-bombing, grooming, uvering, abuse, love-bombing, grooming, uvering, and all these cycles. These cycles drive them up the insanity. Misbehaving badly in any way, including ostentatious cheating, is a way of forcing the partner's hand. Wake up, forgive me, and love me from now. Or dunk me, and let me go. It is brinkmanship at its most acute, and actually, in many ways, a rational strategy. But you see, mentally ill people, these are dysfunctional ways of coping with problems in relationships. Radicalizing, escalating, extreme triangulation, ostentatious cheating, they may achieve the goal in rare cases, but they are so... they are nuclear weapons, they are so destructive that usually nothing survives afterwards. And they do the same thing not only with sex and not only with relationships, but with their lives. They are what I call homebound homeless. It's a homeless with a roof over the head. The homebound homeless is a person who behaves like a stereotypical homeless, even though he or she has a roof over his or her head. The antisocial interpersonal behaviors in cluster B personality disorders usually ameliorate with age, even without treatment. But the outcomes, the cumulative outcomes of years of impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, modulability, defiance, social dysfunction and antisocial behaviors, the cumulative outcomes of all these persist. They're exacerbated by the vagaries of all age. So while the disorders, mental health disorders may disappear, the ruination, the wasteland created by them cannot be reconstructed or changed or revamped. The person is doomed to inhabit these Netherlands created this post-apocalyptic landscape created by his or her mental illness. The personality disorder cannot hold jobs. They have little savings, no close supportive or supportive family, few friends. To compensate for modulability and existential insecurity, they develop dysfunctional behaviors and coping strategies, such as drinking, doing drugs and hoarding. They move from one place to the next, maintaining a schizoid, desultory and solitary lifestyle. Itinerant. Their sex lives consist of binge-drunken one-night stands which involve day trade and sexual assault. Mostly, they're celibate and single, as everybody has given up on them. Their paranoid, referential ideation and their unprovoked aggression only make matters worse. And so the homeless, the homebound homeless, die the way they had lived. Alone, wasted and exhausted by their own existence. Finally, relieved perhaps of their burdens. The pandemic has severed our relationship with death. Our coexistence with this ineluctable feature of life. We need to restore the good relationships we had with death. And sometimes, it's the only solution.