 My name is Saint-Baknin, and I'm the handsome author of malignant self-love, narcissism revisited. Handsome, you say? Get out of here. Okay, okay, keep your call. Don't kill me. I've had the misfortune that the first woman I'd ever met was my mother, and my mother had a clear-cut message for me. You're not lovable. No woman would ever love you. If a woman gets close enough to you, she will try to hurt you egregiously and badly. I'm happy to say that many of her predictions didn't pan out, didn't come true, but not this one regrettably. On this one, she has been dead wrong. Right, sorry. So, obviously and understandably, I became obsessed with issues of sex, gender, the alleged minds of women, cheating, casual sex, romance, courting, intergender communication and interaction, and so on and so forth. I've written a lot about these topics over the years, over the decades actually. I've published a few books, and I'm trying to distill all this information into a series of videos. So there are videos on this channel which deal with promiscuity, with casual sex, with institutions such as marriage and the family, with the war between the genders, with gender vertigo, with changing gender roles, and so on and so forth. And today what I would like to discuss is the connection between sex and gender. We all know by now that sex is one thing, it's a biological thing, predetermined usually, but not in all cases, and gender is socio-cultural. It's something we are taught. It's a part of the process of socialization and acculturation. Role models in our lives teach us how to be male or female, and we this inculcated in us, we emulate what we are taught and what we are taught, and we become men and women. So we should not confuse the biological aspect with the role-play, the sexual, cultural aspect. And yet there's a major upheaval happening. Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called The Second Sex in 1949, and she said one is not born, but rather becomes a woman. And with same-sex marriage becoming a legal reality throughout the world, many more children are going to be raised by homosexual, gay and lesbian parents, or even by transgender or transsexual parents. How is this going to affect the child's masculinity or femininity? Is being a gay man less manly than being a heterosexual man? Is a woman who is the outcome of a sex-change operation less feminine than her natural-born sisters? In which sense is a virile lesbian, of which less of a man, than an effeminate heterosexual or homosexual man? And how should we classify and treat bisexuals? B-sexuals. A-sexuals. What about modern women? In 43% of all households, the breadwinner is a she, the primary breadwinner is a woman. All those feminist women in traditional male positions who are as sexually aggressive as men and as prone to the same varieties of misconduct, cheating on their spouses, one-night stands, are they women? Are they men? Are they less womanly? And are there stay-at-home dad-parents and partners? Are these not men enough? How are sex preferences related to gender differentiation? And if one's sex and genitalia can be chosen and altered, it will. Why not one's gender, regardless of one's natural equipment? Can we decouple gender roles from sexual functions and endowments? It's a fraught subject because today we can change our sex, our genitalia surgically. Today we can make choices as to whether we are men and women and we can change. We can, you know, there's transgender. But the very word transgender is very misleading because the trans is actually transsexual. The gender is a choice. Can you have a penis and be a woman? What in some societies and cultures throughout history? This has happened. Can you have a vagina and be a man? This has happened even more frequently throughout history and in various societies and culture. Aren't the feminist, liberal, emancipated women, they're responsive, transform male partners? Aren't they as molded by specific social norms and narratives as their more traditional conservative counterparts? And when men adopted to the demands of the new post-modern woman, were they not then rebuffed by that very same female as emasculated men, unmanly men, effeminate men? When men try to become what women claimed that they had wanted them to become, they were rejected. And what is the source of this gender chaos? Why do people act modern while at heart they still hark back to erstwhile mores and ethos? Perhaps a good starting point would be nature. In nature, male and female are distinct. She-elephants are gregarious, they're very sociable. He-elephants, male elephants are solitary. Male zebra finches are loquacious. Females, unmute. Female green-spoon worms are 200,000 times larger than their male mates. These striking differences are biological. Yet, yet they do lead to differentiation in social roles and in skill acquisition, as we will see. Alan Pease is the author of a book titled Why Men Don't Listen and Women Country Maps. He believes that women are spatially challenged compared to men, that don't perceive space properly. The British firm, Admiral Insurance, conducted a study of half a million claims. They found that women were almost twice as likely as men to have a collision in a car park. They're 23% more likely to hit a stationary car and women are 15% more likely to reverse into another vehicle. And these enchanting figures were published by Reuters. Yet, gender differences are often the outcomes of bad scholarship, such as in this case. Consider Admiral Insurance's data. As Britain's automobile association, AA, correctly pointed out immediately, women drivers tend to make more short journeys around and inside towns and cities. They go to shopping centers and these involve frequent parking. Men travel more long distance and intercity. Women travel intracity, so they park more often. Obviously, they have more parking tickets and more collisions, hence the ubiquity in certain kinds of claims. Regarding women's alleged spatial deficiency in Britain, girls have been outperforming boys in scholastic aptitude tests, including geometry, including, yes, maths. And this has been happening since 1988, imagine. In an op-ed published by the New York Times on January 23rd, 2005, Olivia Judson cited this example. She says, beliefs that men are intrinsically better at diesel vet have repeatedly led to discrimination and prejudice and then they have been proven to be nonsense. Women were thought not to be world-class musicians, but when American Symphony orchestras introduced blind auditions in the 1970s, the musician played behind the screen so that his or her gender was invisible to those listening. And at that point, the number of women offered jobs in professional orchestras increased magically. Similarly in science, studies of the ways that grant applications are evaluated have shown that women are more likely to get financing when those reading the applications do not know the sex of the applicant. On the other wing of the divide, Anthony Clare, a British psychiatrist and the author of the book On Men, wrote, at the beginning of the 21st century, it is difficult to avoid a conclusion that men are in serious trouble. Throughout the world, developed and developing, anti-social behavior is essentially male. Violence, sexual abuse of children, illicit drug use, alcohol misuse, gambling, they're all overwhelmingly male activities. The courts and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to aggression, the liquid behavior, risk-taking, social mayhem, men win gold. Just ask me. Men also mature later. Again, ask me. They die earlier. Don't ask me. Are more susceptible to infections and most types of cancer. Men are more likely to be dyslexic, to suffer from a host of mental health disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and men are far more likely to commit suicide. Of course, men die much earlier than women. In her book Stiffed, The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi describes a crisis of masculinity following the breakdown of manhood models and work and family structures in the last five decades. And in the film Boys Don't Cry, a teenage girl binds her breasts and acts the male in a caricatured relish of stereotypes of virility. Being a man is merely a state of mind. The movie implies. But what does it really mean to be male? What's the meaning of being female? Are gender identity and sexual preferences genetically determined? Can they be reduced to one sex? Or are genders amalgams of biological, social and psychological factors in constant interaction? Are genders immutable lifelong features or dynamically evolving frames of self-reference? In rural North Albania, until recently, in families with no male male air, women could choose to forego sex and childbearing. They could alter the external appearance, they could become men in the patriarchs of their clans, women, with all attendant rights and obligations. Women could even go to coffee shops and smoke outside unthinkable under the kanun, the code of conduct in mountainous northern Albania. In the aforementioned New York Times op-ed, Olivia Judson op-hides. She says, many sex differences are not, therefore, the result of his having one gene while she has another. Rather, gender differences are attributable to the way particular genes behave when they find themselves in him rather than in her. The magnificent difference between male and female green spoon worms, for example, has nothing to do with their having different genes. Each green spoon worm larvae could go either way, could become a male or a female. Which sex it becomes depends on whether it meets, comes across a female during its first three weeks of life. So a green spoon worm, if it comes across a female in the first three weeks of life becomes a female, comes across a male, becomes a male. If it meets a female, it becomes a male, sorry, and prepares to regurgitate. If it doesn't, it becomes a female. And then it settles into a crack in the seafloor. So childs encountered during the first three weeks of life, in the case of this specific organism, determines this organism's gender. It comes across a female, becomes a male, comes across some, doesn't come across a female, becomes a female. Yet certain traits attributed to one sex are surely better accounted for by the demands of one's environment. Like cultural factors, the process of socialization, gender roles, what Georges Devereux called ethno-psychiatry in his book, Basic Problems of Ethno-psychiatry, published by University of Chicago Press, 1980. Devereux suggested to divide the unconscious into the id, the part that was always instinctual and unconscious, and the ethnic unconscious, repressed material that was once conscious. The latter is mostly molded by prevailing cultural mores and includes all our defense mechanisms and most of the superego. So how can we tell whether our sexual role is mostly in our blood or in our brains? How can we tell if it's innate or learned, acquired? I'm talking about sexual roles. The scrutiny of borderline cases of human sexuality, notably transgendered or intersex people. When we study these cases, it can yield clues as to the distribution and relative weights of biological, social and psychological determinants of gender identity formation. The results of a study conducted by Uwe Hartmann, Hinerk Becker and Claudia Rüfer-Hesse, the apologies for these names, in 1997, studied the title self- and gender narcissistic pathology personality factors in gender dysphoric patients. It was published in the International Journal of Transgenderism. Yes, there is such a thing. And so they write in this study that such transgenderness indicates significant psychopathological aspects and narcissistic dysregulation in a substantial portion of the patients. They pathologize transgenderism. Are these psychopathological aspects merely reactions to underlying, let's say, physiological realities and changes? Are they somehow interlinked to the body? Or maybe people develop mental health pathologies because of social ostracism being labeled and shunned by society. Maybe being excommunicated, mocked, derided constantly caused the pathology in these so-called patients. I believe this is the explanation. But the authors conclude the cumulative evidence of our study is consistent with the view that gender dysphoria is a disorder of the sense of self as has been proposed by Beitel in 1985 or Pfeuflin in 1993. The central problem in our patients is about identity and the self in general. The transsexual wish seems to be an attempt at reassuring and stabilizing the self-coherence, which in turn can lead to a further destabilization of the self. And this self is already too fragile. In this view, the body is instrumentalized to create a sense of identity. And the splitting symbolized in the hiatus between the rejected body self and other parts of the self is more between good and bad objects than between masculine and feminine. Freud, Kraft Ebbing and Fluss suggested that we are all bisexual, bisexual to a certain degree. As early as 1910, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld argued in Berlin that absolute genders are abstractions, invented extremes, in other words, idealizations or ideals. The consensus today is that one's sexuality is mostly a psychological construct, which reflects gender roles or gender role orientation. Joanne Meyerowitz, professor of history at Indiana University and the editor of the Journal of American History, observes in her published book How Sex Changed a History of Transsexuality in the United States. So she observes there that the very meaning of masculinity and femininity is in constant flux. You can't argue with it. That part is absolutely true. Transgender activists, says Meyerowitz, insist that gender and sexuality represent distinct analytical categories. The New York Times wrote in its review of the book, some male to female transsexuals have sex with men and call themselves homosexuals. Some female to male transsexuals have sex with women and call themselves lesbians. Some transsexuals call themselves asexual, etc., etc. So it is only in the mind, you see. This would be, I think, thinking too far, overthinking. A large body of scientific evidence points to the genetic and biological underpinnings of sexual behavior and preferences. The German science magazine, GEO, reported that the males of the fruit fly drozophila melangogaste, I'm sorry, switched from heterosexuality to homosexuality as the temperature in the lab was increased from 19 to 30 degrees Celsius. The flies reverted to chasing females as the temperature was lowered. Temperature up, they became homosexuals. Temperature down, they became humanizers. You can't trust flies. The brain structures of homosexual sheep are different to those of straight sheep, a study conducted recently by the Oregon Health and Science University and the US Department of Agriculture's sheep experiment experimentation station in Dubois, Idaho. So, straight sheep, homosexual sheep, don't have the same brains as any conspiracy theorists could have told you. Similar differences were found between gay men and straight ones in 1995 in Holland and elsewhere. The brains are different. The pre-optic area of the hypothalamus was larger in heterosexual men than in both homosexual men and straight women. According to an article titled When Sexual Development Goes Arrive by Susan Miller, published in the September 2000 issue The World and I, various medical conditions give rise to sexual ambiguity. For example, there's something called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, CAH. It involves excessive androgen production by the adrenal cortex, and it results in mixed genitalia, both female and male. A person with a complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, AIS, has a vagina, external female genitalia, and functioning androgen-producing testicles. But he has no uterus and often opium tubes, luckily for us. People with a rare 5-alpha weductase deficiency syndrome, these people are born with ambiguous genitalia. They appear at first to be girls, women, girls, and then at puberty, such people develop testicles, and the clitoris swells and becomes a penis. Hemophrodites possess both ovaries and testicles, both in most cases rather underdeveloped. Sometimes the ovaries and testicles in hemophrodites, androgenous people, are combined into a chimera called ovotestis. Stop going, I know. Most of these individuals have the chromosomal composition of a woman, together with traces of the Y male chromosome. All the hemophrodites have a sizable penis, though rarely it generates sperm. Women, you're warned. Some hemophrodites develop breasts during puberty and menstruate. Men, you're warned. Very few hemophrodites even get pregnant and give birth. All of us are warned. I'm Fausto Sterling, a developmental geneticist, professor of medical science at Brown University, an author of the book Sexing the Body. She postulated in 1993 a continuum of five sexes to supplant the current dimorphism. So she suggested that there are males, which we are all acquainted with, and extinct species. There are merms, merms, male pseudo-hemophrodites. There are herms, so merms and herms. Herms are true hermaphrodites. There are herms, females, pseudo-hermaphrodites, and there are females. Intersexuality, hermaphroditism, is a natural human state, actually. You see, we are all conceived in the womb with the potential to develop into either sex. The embryonic developmental default is female, actually. We all start as females. Some of us never get over it. A series of triggers during the first few weeks of pregnancy places the fetus on the path to maleness. So, as every woman can tell you, becoming a male is a result of an accident. In rare cases, some women have a male's genetic makeup, xy chromosomes, in vice versa. But in the vast majority of cases, one of the sexes is clearly selected. Relics of the stifled sex, the suppressed sex, remain. They remain in the body. It's important to understand. Women have the clitoris. It's a kind of symbolic penis. Not so symbolic in some of them, by the way. Men have dressed mammary glands. Men have even nipples, must I know so. The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition describes the formation of ovaries and testes this way. In the young embryo, a pair of gonads develop that are indifferent or neutral, showing no indication whether they are destined to develop into testes or into ovaries. There are also two different duct systems, one of which can develop into the female system of oviducts and related apparatus, and the other into the male sperm duct system. As development of the embryo proceeds, either the male or the female reproductive tissue differentiates in the originally neutral gonad of the mammal. Yet sexual preferences, genitalia, and even secondary sex characteristics such as facial and pubic hair, these are first order phenomena. Can genetics and biology account for male and female behavior patterns? Can they explain social interactions, what we call today gender identity? Can the multi-tiered complexity and richness of human masculinity and femininity arise, all of it, from simpler deterministic biological building blocks? Sociobiologists would have a stink zone. They say, for instance, that the fact that we are mammals is astonishingly often overlooked. Most mammalian families are composed of mother and offspring. Males are peripathetic absentees. Arguably, high rates of divorce and birth and high rates of divorce and birth out of wedlock, coupled with rising promiscuity, today, nearly reinstate this natural default mode. Lionel Tiger, professor of anthropology, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says so. The three-quarters of all divorces are initiated by women tends to support this view. Furthermore, gender identities determined during gestation claim some scholars. Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii and Dr. Keith Zygmuntzon, a practicing psychiatrist, studied the much celebrated John Joann case. It was an accidentally castrated normal male. He was surgically modified to look female. He was raised as a girl. Nothing helped. To no avail. He reverted to being a male at puberty. His gender identity seems to have been inborn, assuming he was not subjected to conflicting cues from his human environment. The case is extensively described in John Colapinto Stone as nature made him the boy who was raised as a girl. Hellscout News cited a study published in the November 2002 issue of child development. The researchers from City University of London found that the level of maternal testosterone during pregnancy affects the behavior of neonatal girls and renders this behavior more masculine. More testosterone makes girls more masculine. High testosterone girls enjoy activities typically considered male behavior, like playing with trucks, playing with guns. Voice behavior remains unaltered, even when there is high testosterone present. Yet other scholars, like John Money, insisted newborns are a black slate. Tabula rasa, as far as their gender identities concerned at least. This is also the prevailing view, by the way. That's their orthodoxy. We teach at University that when children upon their black slate, gender and sexual identities we are told, are fully formed in the process of socialization, which ends by the third year of life. The Sacrupida Britannica game sums it up this way. Like an individual's concept of his or her sexual, gender identity develops by means of parental example, social reinforcement, and language. Parents teach sex-appropriate behavior to their children from an early age, and this behavior is reinforced as the child grows older and enters a wider social world. As the child declares language, he also learns very early the distinction between he and she, and he understands which pertains to him or to her self. So by now I'm confused, and if I'm confused with 199 IQ, you must be confused. So which is it, nature or nurture? There is no disputing the fact that our sexual physiology, and in all probability our sexual preferences, are determined in the womb. Men and women are different physiologically, and as a result they're also different psychologically. No one is disputing this template. Society through its agents, for almost amongst which are family, peers, teachers. Society represses or encourages these genetic propensities and proclivities. It does so. Society does it by propagating gender roles, gender-specific lists of alleged traits, permissible behavior patterns, boundaries, prescriptive and proscriptive morals and norms, etc. etc. Our gender identity or sexual role is shorthand for the way we make use of our natural genotypic, phenotypic endowments in conformity with social cultural gender roles, dictated socially determined gender roles. So it's like we have a device or we have an instrument and then we have a user's manual. Society gives us the user's manual. It tells us you have a penis, that's the way you should behave. That's what you should do with your penis. That's how you should behave because you have a penis, and that's what you should never do because you have a penis. Inevitably as a composition and bias of these lists change, because these lists change all the time. The Victorian list has nothing to do with today's modern list. So as these lists change, so does the meaning of being male or being female. Gender roles are constantly redefined by tectonic shifts in the definition and functioning of basic social units, such as the nuclear family in the workplace. The cross-fertilization of gender-related cultural memes renders masculinity and femininity fluid concepts, not rigid ones. Once sex equals one's bodily equipment, that's objective. It's finite. It's immutable inventory. But our endowments can be put to many users in different cognitive and effective contexts, subject to varying exegetic interpretations or frameworks. As opposed to sex, gender is therefore a social-cultural narrative. Both heterosexual and homosexual men, for example, ejaculate. Both straight and lesbian women climax if they are lucky. What distinguishes them from each other are subjective introjects, internalizations of social-cultural conventions, not objective immutable facts. In the New Gender Wars, published in the November-December 2000 issue of Psychology Today, Sarah Bluestain sums up the biosocial model proposed by Mike Eagley, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and a former student of his, Wendy Wood, now a professor at the Texas A&M University. So she says, like the evolutionary psychologists, Eagley and Wood reject social constructionist notions that all gender differences are created by culture. But to the question of where they come from, they answer differently. Not our genes, but our roles in society. This narrative focuses on how societies respond to the basic biological differences. For example, men have muscles that are strong. Women have reproductive capabilities that men don't have. Society responds to these differences and how societies encourage men and women to follow certain patterns. So if you are spending a lot of time nursing your kid, explains Wood, then you don't have the opportunity to devote large amounts of time to developing specialized skills and to engaging tasks outside the home. And Eagley adds, if women are charged with caring for infants, what happens is that women are more nurturing, becomes their nature. Nurturing becomes their nature. Societies have to make the adult system work. So socialization of girls is arranged to give them experience in nurturing. According to this interpretation, as the environment changes, so will the range and texture of gender differences. At a time in Western countries, when female reproduction is extremely low, even groin, nursing is totally optional. Child care alternatives are many, and mechanization lessens the importance of male size and strength. Women are no longer restricted as much by their smaller size and by child bearing. That means, argue Eagley and Wood, that role structures for men and women will change, and not surprisingly, the way we socialize people in these new roles will also change. Indeed, says Wood, sex differences seem to be reduced in societies where men and women have similar status. If you are looking to live in more gender-neutral environment, try Scandinavia. I don't like it. I like gender differences. I think that spies to life. What about love, you say? If gender differences are mere social-artificial constructs, societies attempt to leverage the natural endowments, natural biological endowments of men and women. How do you explain love? If this, if it's only socially and culturally determined, why do we love? Why do we need love? Why don't we simply transact? Why this cascade of hormones and explosion of emotions and so on and so forth? And why is it too directional? Why do men love women and women love men? Of course, their minorities, men love men and women love women, but even then they are genderless. In typical lesbian couples or homosexuals, gay, male couple, they're also the woman side and the men side, the bottom, the up, whatever you want to call it. How do you explain this? How do you explain the connection between love, which supposedly is a biological or psychobiological phenomenon, and gender roles, which are totally sexually, if it's totally, I mean, if gender roles are totally socially and culturally determined. The unpalatable truth is that falling in love is in some ways indistinguishable from a severe pathology. If we conceive of love or conceive of love as a form of mental illness, the problem is solved. It's a deviance. It's a kind of a problem. Behavior changes in when you're in love are reminiscent of psychosis. Biochemically speaking, passionate love closely imitates substance abuse. Appearing in the BBC series Body Hits on December 4th, 2002, Dr. John Matt Marsden, the head of the British National Addiction Center, said that love is addictive, akin to cocaine and speed. Sex is a booby trap intended to bind the partners long enough in order to bond. In experiments on volans conducted by a German scientist, Dr. Oliver Bosch, male voles separated from females after five days spent together, and they evinced marked signs of the animal equivalent of depression in humans. And in animals it's known as passive stress coping. Passive stress coping is the same, like depression in humans. So the males were depressed. When they were separated from the females, they became depressed. I have no idea why, by the way. The I'm kidding. These males had extreme levels of the stress biochemical, corticosterone. Their HPA, hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, was so hard at work that their glands hypertrophied. They almost died because, you know, they were separated from their females. But when Bosch blocked in their tiny brains the receptors for CFR, corticotropine releasing factor, he struck gold. The males remembered their female males. They bonded with the females, but they did not care where they were, where the females were at the time. Both the voles which remained with their females, and the ones who got separated from their females, had elevated levels of CFR in the bed nucleus of striataminalis, the BNST. Bonding generates CFR, a CRF, I'm sorry, not CFR, CRF. Bonding generates CRF, but prevents it from acting on the HPA as long as the couple is together. It generates this corticosterone, this woman, but prevents it from acting on the axis, the brain axis, the relevant brain parts. So it's like the hormone is isolated, separated as long as there is bonding, as long as the couple is together. Compassion or addiction to the mate replaces infatuation, dopamine release. It feels bad to be apart. It feels bad to be separated, and people seek to ameliorate the misery by restoring their togetherness, or by denying or reframing the separateness. According to Dr. George Kuhn, chairman of the Committee on Neurobiology Addictive Disorders at the Scripps Research Institute, the CRF signals, the hormone signals, that a loss has to be addressed. The same mechanism is at play in drug addiction and alcoholism. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, Andreas Bartels and Simeo Zecki of University College in London, showed that the same areas of the brain are active when abusing drugs, and when you're in love. Like exactly the same. The prefrontal cortex, hyperactive and depressed patients, is inactive when you are besotted. When you're in love, you can't be depressed, I think. How can this be reconciled with the low levels of serotonin that are the telltale sign of both depression and infatuation is not known. In other words, infatuation is very strange. It has a depressive element in it. It's a high level of serotonin, but there is no experience of depression. The parts of the brain that are active in depression are inactive, even though the high serotonin should have activated the depressive areas. It seems like love is the antidote of serotonin, negates serotonin, and in this sense, technically speaking, clinically speaking, love is an antidepressant. Other MRI studies conducted in 2006 and 2007 by Dr. Lucy Brown, professor in the Department of Neurology and Neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues. These studies revealed that the cow date and the ventral tegmental brain areas involved in cravings. So when you crave food, when you crave drink, etc., etc., these areas light up, the cow date and the ventral tegmental. So these brain areas and the secretion of dopamine, which go with it, with these areas, when these areas are active, they secrete dopamine. They're all lit up in subjects who view photos of their loved ones. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation. It causes sensation akin to a substance-induced hive. Your loved one is a drug, and it she gives you a high every time you see her, every time you see her photo, let alone every time you touch her, every time you smell her, every time you taste her. On August 14, 2007, the New Scientist News Service gave the details of a study originally published in the Journal of Adolescent Health earlier that year. Serge Brand of the Psychiatric University Clinics in Basel, Switzerland, and his colleagues interviewed 113 teenagers, 17 year old was the average, 65 of whom reported having fallen in love recently. 65 out of 130, I should be so lucky. The conclusion, the last truck adolescents, slept less, acted more compulsively more often, had lots of ideas and creative energy, and were more likely to engage in risky, reckless behavior, such as reckless driving. In other words, they were manic, like in bipolar, the manic phase. The authors of the study wrote, we were able to demonstrate that adolescents in early stage, intense romantic love did not differ, were the same, like patients during a hypomanic stage. This led them to conclude that intense romantic loving teenagers is a psychopathologically prominent stage, the equivalent of a hypomanic phase in bipolar. But is it erotic lust? Or is it love that brings about these cerebral love events? Maybe it's simply our body talking, maybe it's not love, maybe it's our body. I'm not going into details, not to become pornography. As distinct from love, lust is brought on by surges of sex hormones, such as testosterone and estrogen. These induce an indiscriminate scramble for physical gratification, in some people, more than in others. In the brain, the hypothalamus controls hunger, controls thirst, controls other primordial drives, and there's another part called amygdala, the locus of arousal. When you fall in love, or when you are lustful, when you want to, sorry, make love, these parts become active. Attraction transpires once a more or less appropriate object is found, with the right body language, right speed and tone of voice, and sometimes, under the influence of alcohol, people look more attractive. And it results in a monopoly of sleep and eating disorders. A recent study in the University of Chicago demonstrated that testosterone levels shoot up by one third, even during a casual chat with a female stranger. The stronger the hormonal reaction, the more marked the changes in behavior concluded the offers. And this look may be part of a larger mating response. In animals, testosterone provokes aggression and recklessness. The hormone's readings in married men and fathers are markedly lower than in single males still playing the field. So, if you're a father, if you're married, say bye-bye to your testosterone. Go single, play the field, say hi to your testosterone. And still, the long-term outcomes of being in love are lustful. Dopamine, heavily secreted while falling in love, triggers the production of testosterone, and sexual attraction kicks in. So, chicken and egg, it's difficult to tell. Helen Fisher of Rutger University suggests a three-phase model of falling in love. Each stage involves the distinct set of chemicals. The BBC summed it up succinctly and sensationally as it always does. Events occurring in the brain when we are in love have similarity with mental illness. Point taken, point made. Thank you very much BBC. Moreover, we are attracted to people with the same genetic makeup and the same smell, pheromones, of our parents. Dr. Martha McClintock of the University of Chicago studied feminine attraction to sweaty t-shirts formerly worn by males. The closer the smell resembled, her father's, the more attracted and aroused the woman became. Falling in love is therefore an exercise in proxy insist and a vindication of Freud's much maligned oedipus and electro complexes. McClintock's work contradicts other less conclusive and far more controversial findings regarding the major histocompatibility complex, MHC, or the human leukocyte antigen, HLA. Studies demonstrated either fewer HLA matches than were expected, over at the Alliance, or no such effect whatsoever. Chakes, Cowl and Donaline 2008. Wettekin conducted body odorous studies, again with sweaty t-shirts that demonstrated a female preference for MHC dissimilarity, not like father, especially during ovulation. But it's very important to emphasize that all the women he tested did not use oral contraceptives. Men also preferred MHC this assortative made choices. Today, if I have to sum up the current bleeding edge state of knowledge, it would seem that women and men select partners, potential mates, who are dissimilar to them, not like them, genetically, and not like them in terms of the immune system. However, this preference is dramatically affected when women consume contraceptives. When women use contraceptives, it's reversed, and women actually are looking for men who remind them of their fathers. Again, the sweaty t-shirts, the main reason I'm not exercising. Writing in February 2004 issue of the journal Neuroimage, Andreas Bartels, aforementioned of University College London's Welcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, he described identical reactions in the brains of young mothers looking at their babies and in the brains of people looking at their lovers. And he concluded both romantic and maternal love are highly rewarding experiences that are linked to the perpetuation of the species and consequently have a closely linked biological function of crucial evolutionary importance, he told the poor reporter from Reuters. This incestuous backdrop of love was further demonstrated by psychologist David Perret of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The subjects in his experiments preferred their own faces, in other words the composite of their two parents, when computer moved into the opposite sex. So he took a woman, he super reposed her face on a male, and then he showed a series of random faces, and she chose the face of the male that resembled hers, in other words the face of a male, that was the composite of her mother and father. Same with males, they reacted the same. Body secretions play a major role in the onslaught of love. In results published in February 2007 in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley demonstrated convincingly that women who sniffed androstudyonom, a signaling chemical found in male sweat, male saliva and male semen, so women who smelled this, experienced higher levels of the hormone courtism. This results in sexual arousal and improved mood. Let me repeat this for you women. Women who smell androstudyonom, which is a kind of chemical, found in male sweat, male saliva, and male semen have a better mood and they are sexually aroused. This effect lasts for a whopping one hour, so if you are down, if you are depressed, sniff your partner. Still, contrary to prevailing misconceptions, love is mostly about negative emotions. As Professor Arthur R. Aaron from State University of New York at Stony Brook has shown, in the first few meetings people misinterpret certain physical cues and feelings, notably fear and thrill as falling in love. You look at the potential mate, she is actually afraid of you, or she is thrilled by the novelty and risk, and you misinterpret this as falling in love. It's well known that men, men, have an sexual overperception. They tend to interpret any kind of kind and nice and empathic and gentle female behavior as an invitation to have sex. Thus, counter-intuitively, anxious people, especially those with the serotonin-transported gene, are more sexually active. They fall in love more often. Obsessive thoughts regarding the loved ones, even intrusive thoughts, compulsive acts, they are also common. Perception is distorted when you are in love, as is cognition. Love is blind, and the lover easily fails the reality test. Falling in love involves the enhanced secretion of B. Fenille ethylamine, P.E.A. of the love chemical, in the first two to four years of the relationship. This natural drug, Fenille ethylamine, creates a euphoric high. It helps obscure the failings and shortcomings of the potential mate. You idealize the mate. Now you understand the biochemical background for idealization. It would be a very interesting research agenda to select a group of people who have been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, and to test the biochemistry of their brains and the biochemistry of their bodies, hormones, signaling molecules, neurotransmitters, during the idealization phase, to see whether actually narcissism is a chemically induced state. Such oblivion, perceiving only the spouse's good sides while discarding her bed ones or ignoring her bed ones, reframing, is a pathology akin to the primitive psychological defense mechanism known as splitting, which is very common in narcissists. Narcissists, patients suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, and borderlines, patients suffering from borderline personality disorder, also idealize romantic or intimate partners. A similar cognitive emotional impairment is common in other mental health conditions. The activity of a host of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, adrenaline, nor epinephrine, and serotonin, all these neurotransmitters, the activity is heightened, or in the case of serotonin, lower in both parabores. I'm talking about the second phase of love, yet such irregularities are also associated with, for example, obsessive compulsive disorder, with depression. The clinical biochemical, the cerebral and neuroscientific clinical picture of love is identical to the clinical picture of depression. If I show you brains, people in love with brains of people, depressed people, brains of people with obsessive compulsive disorder, you would be hard pressed to say which is which and who is who. It is telling that once attachment is formed, once the bond is there, once infatuation gives way to a more stable and less exuberant relationship, the levels of these substances return to normal. They are replaced by two hormones, endorphins, which usually play a part in social interactions, including bonding and sex. The first one is oxytocin, the cuddling chemical, and the second one is vasopressin. Oxytocin facilitates bonding. It is released in the mother during breastfeeding, in the members of the couple when they spend time together, and when they sexually orgasm. Viagra, sildenofil, seems to facilitate the release of oxytocin, at least in rats. It seems, therefore, that the distinctions we often make between types of love, motherly love, romantic love, these distinctions are artificial. As far as human biochemistry goes, love is love is love. As neuroscientist Larry Young's research with prairie walls at the Yerkes National Primates Research Center at Emory University, he studied eminstries, and I'm quoting, human love is set off by a biochemical chain of events that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits, involving mother-child bonding. And these circuits are stimulated in mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery, and nursing, and also when you fall in love. He told The New York Times, and the article is titled, anti-love drug, maybe ticket to bliss, January 12, 2009. So he told The New York Times, some of our sexuality has evolved to stimulate that same oxytocin system to create female male bonds. Dr. Young said, noting that sexual foreplay and intercourse stimulate the same parts of the woman's body that are involved in giving birth and nursing. This hormonal hypothesis, which is by no means proven fact, would help explain a couple of differences between humans and less monogamous mammals. Females desire to have sex even when they are not fertile, and males erotic fascination with breasts. More frequent sex and more attention to breasts, Dr. Young said, could help build long-term bonds through a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides, like the oxytocin released during a foreplay or an orgasm. Researchers have achieved similar results by squirting oxytocin into people's nostrils. He continues, a related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles or naturally activated by sex. After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married. If we give an oxytocin blocker to female voles, they become like 95% of other mammal species. They will not bond, no matter how many times they mate with a mate or how hard he tries to bond. They mate, it feels really good, they move on if another male comes along. Sounds like the typical modern western woman. If love is similarly biochemically based, you shouldn't in theory be able to suppress it in a similar way. And here's another interesting research agenda. Modern western women, young modern western women under the age of 35 were conditioned by the hookup culture. They behave like these female voles. I mean, it's like they don't have an active oxytocin system. Perhaps it's not an accident that fewer of them get married. Fewer of them have relationships, meaningful, intimate, long-term relationships, committed relationships, and fewer of them have children. It seems like a big part of their brain, the mother-child subsystem and all the hormones, neuropeptides, neurotransmitters associated with that system has been, it's like this system has been disabled in modern western women, young ones especially. And it's possible to disable this system via cultural and social conditioning, of course. That's a part that's missing. People think, but wait a minute, it's biological, motherhood is biological, not so. Motherhood, like everything else, is a template. It has to be activated. It's activated by social and cultural dictates, mores, prescriptions. Society changes and tells you something else. Some parts of your brain will go dormant. Other parts of your brain will rewire. It's called neuroplasticity. Love in all its phases and manifestations is an addiction, probably to the various forms of internally secreted neuro-repinivir, such as the aforementioned amphetamine-like PEA. Love, in other words, is a form of substance abuse. The withdrawal of romantic love has serious mental health repercussions. But like every addiction, we treat addictions, we reverse them, we treat alcoholism, we treat drug abuse, not so successfully, but in about one-third of cases, we succeed to reverse the behavior. Love is the same. A study conducted by Dr. Kenneth Kendler, professor of psychiatry and director of the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, and by others. This study was published in September 2002, issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, and the study reveals that breakups often lead to depression and anxiety, shocking what scientists are discovering. Any grandmother could have told them the same. Other fMRI-based studies demonstrate that how the insular cortex, in charge of experiencing pain, becomes active when subjects viewed photos or former loved ones. Love and lust depend on context as well as, for example, psychological makeup, as well as biochemistry. They all must interact for the effect to be created. One can fall in and out of love with the very same person whose biochemistry presumably hasn't changed at all. The vast majority of one-night standards reported that they did not find their partners sexually alluring, actually. It was the opportunity that beckoned not any specific attraction or they had their own needs. Similarly, the very same acts, hugging, kissing, sexual explicit overtures, can be interpreted as innocuous, depending on who does what to whom and in which circumstances. Indeed, love cannot be reduced to its biochemical and electrical components. Love is not tantamount to our bodily processes. Rather, love is the way we experience our bodily processes and how we experience bodily processes is exactly gender role. It's exactly what society and culture tell us. They tell us how to experience our bodies and what's happening inside our bodies. Love is how we interpret the flaws and ebbs of compounds using a higher level language. In other words, love is pure poetry. We are very rarely in love with a person. Most often we're in love with an idea, the idea of being in love. We're in love with love. We are in love with the idea of being someone's slut. We're in love with the idea of being someone's child. We are in love with the idea of being someone's healing parent. Or we are in love with what the person stands for, symbolizing. So we are in love with the idea of not being alone. We're in love with a father figure, our past, a wounded child and so on and so forth. That is a super kaleidoscopic compounded phenomenon. Ask me. We idealize our loved ones to the point that they vanish as individuals and reemerge as elements in our personal narrative, in our pathologies, in our wounds. We fall in love with the stories that we construct about ourselves and about our environment. And we force our loved ones to play scripted and emergent roles in our personal theater production. In this restricted and temporary sense, when we fall in love, we are all narcissists. We fall in love with ourselves via our loved ones, what I call the whole of mirrors effect. Okay, you say this is love, but what about just sex? Isn't sex a purely bodily manifestation, independent of cultures and societies? Traditional sex, the headache cocktail of lust and emotional bonding is all but dead actually. In the culture of casual, almost anonymous hookups, suppressing attendant emerging emotions is the bottom and women and men drift apart, zero valent atoms in an ever shifting kaleidoscopic world. They're separated. Women and men are separated by a yawning expectations gap. Their virtual isolation is aided and abetted by technologies, collectively misnomered, social media. It is increasingly more difficult to both find a mate and to keep him or her. One-fifth of all American couples are sexless. 11% of all Americans live alone. Japan, about half of all adolescents are schizoid, prefer technological gadgets to flesh and blood peers. A quarter of all males in Britain would rather watch the telly or bar crawl with their friends, maid friends, than garner calm and pleasure. People everywhere increasingly rely on internet pornography and autoerotic stimulation to relieve themselves. A polite term for masturbation. Sex has become the solid equivalent of other excretory bodily functions, like going to the toilet to do unmentionable things. It is best pursued in solitude. At the root of this upheaval is an in-thought and violent subversion of received gender roles. Women sought to become not only equal to men, but identical to men. Rather than encourage a peaceful evolution, women embarked on a series of shattering and disorienting gender wars with men as the demonized enemy. Attempting assertiveness, women found aggression. Relationships have become virulent battlefields and the zero testing grounds of a brave new world. No wonder men find women bafflingly masculine and unattractive. Women and men recoil from commitment and bonding. Because the rules of engagement are now fuzzy, the resources required are depleting, the rewards are scanty and the risks pecuniary and emotional devastating. Birth rates have plunged well below the replacement rate in most industrialized society. Population is diminishing. Child rearing requires stable arrangements with reasonable prognosis of functional health, functional longevity. None of this exists today. In short, the typical shamanistic male still wants to get married to his grandmother and his narcissistic female counterparty wishes to live happily ever after with a pinnile reflection of herself. The differences in expectations lead to discrepancies in performance, which are all but unbridgeable and irreconcilable. Break-up rates are unprecedented in human history. A lucrative business of divorce is no longer frowned upon and is facilitated by lenient legislation and a veritable cornucopia of institutions. The proliferation of models of pairing and cohabitation is proof positive that the system is broken. It's every man for himself now. Everyone negotiates his existence with a partner separately. Society is even more clueless and impotent than the individuals it is ostensibly comprised of and therefore can provide no normative guidance, no help, no support, and no insight. People react to this massive rupture in various ways. Some people abstain from or renounce sex altogether. A few experiment with B or homosexuality. Others immerse themselves in cyber sex in its multifarious forms. Many choose one-night stands and random encounters rendered riskless by contraceptives and made widely available by a modern transportation, telecommunication, dating apps and so on. Opportunities for all the above-abound and socially well-tolerated, recreational, non-committal, and emotionalist sex is on the rise. In a civilization centered on brain power, men have lost the relative advantage and edge that brawn muscles used to provide. Monogamy is increasingly considered as past its expiry date. A historical aberration that reflects the economic and political realities of bygone eras. Moreover, the incidence of lifelong child-free or childless singlehood has skyrocketed, as people hope for their potential or actual relationship partners to provide for all their sexual, emotional, social, and economic needs, and then they get solely disappointed when these partners fail to meet these highly unrealistic expectations. In an age of economics of sufficiency, electronic entertainment, self-gratification, the art of compromising relationships is gone for good. Single motherhood sometimes via IVF with no identifiable partner. Single motherhood has become the norm in many countries. Even within marriages or committed relationships, solitary pursuits such as separations, girls boys nights out, these are the norm. In an age of malignant individualism, bordering on narcissism, men and women alike put themselves, their fantasies, their needs first. All else, family included, be that. And with five decades of uninterrupted prosperity, birth control, and feminism women's leap, most of the female denizens of the West have acquired the financial war withal to realize their dreams at the expense of and to the detriment of collectives that they had ostensibly belonged, such as the nuclear family. Feminism is movement focused on negatives, obliterating women's age or bondage. But it offers few constructive ideas regarding women's new roles and the way forward. By casting men as the enemy, by demonizing men, feminism also failed to educate men. Feminism failed to convert men into useful allies. Indeed, what has changed is not the incidence of adultery, even among women. Their good grounds, I assume, that it has remained the same throughout human history. The phenomenon quantitatively and qualitatively has always been the same. It was merely underreport. What has changed, what have changed of the social acceptability of extramarital sex, both before and during marriage, and also the ease of obtaining divorce. People discuss adultery openly, where before it was a taboo topic. And so what happens is that we idealize stereotypical gender roles. Women are magic embodied in beauty and strength. These guys, this frailty. Women originate life. Women sustain life through love. Women are nature. Women are empathy. They are communicative, natural networks. Women form networks passively. Women are also far tougher, resilient, far less romantic, less empathic than men. They have to be. In majority of cases, women are still their children's primary caregivers, and men are not giving them any help. Women are complaining that men don't commit and so on and so forth, and I touched upon it in another video, where I explained that if you give men free sex, why would they commit? The sexual inflation. Millennial suppression by men and their patriarchy led women to resort to the weapons of the weak and the strategies of the underdog. Underhanded, goal-oriented manipulation was a female feature. Deception, passive aggression, all female behaviors. Women are transactional. They habitually trade love and sex for economic security. Well, until recently, when they've opened up, and now they are offering sex for free. Very unwise. Studies show that women also intensely dislike other women, regard them as threats, and compete with them overtly and covertly. In the presence of men, though, they close ranks, fake solidarity, and defer to the males. You see, the stereotype, the gender role stereotype of women, has nothing to do with reality. Now, ostensibly, the paradigm shift. Women are no longer owned, though a majority of them are dependent on men as primary or sole breadwinners. I'm talking about the non-west, outside the west. Men are fighting back, terrified by the terra incognita of feminism, by the female sexuality unleashed. But all their habits, old habits die hard, and intergenerational coping strategies are here to stay. Women be women, boys be boys, for a while longer. Relationships between men and women are at an all-time nadir. Nadir, they begin to border on open hostility and hatred. Men hate women, women hate men. This used to be extremely rare when I was a kid, when I was growing up, when I was an adolescent. Today, I think it's a majority. There are no studies, but I fully believe it's a majority. But people remain married to cheating spouses. adultery is rarely given as a cause in divorce cases. They keep bringing children to the world, even though they hate each other. And if you don't want to go single, it is rational to choose to stay with your current cheating partner. There is a 56% chance that your next partner will also cheat on you, and a 73% chance that she will divorce you. Cheating and deception are the new normal. It's like marriages have become zero-sum wrestling matches. That's why you have prenups in the bargaining industries of couple therapies, divorce attorneys. It's not working. This is the institutional side, but the institutional side reflects underlying very pernicious nefarious dynamics between men and women. It's captured with the phrase gender vertigo in this topsy-turvy world. I said repeatedly, and it is based on the most recent studies, contra to the myths propagated by incels and migtails and red pillars and black pillars and every other pillars. In this world, women prefer meek and weak men, losers, wizards, better males. They prefer them to alpha males. Alpha male is not someone who has muscles and looks good. Alpha male is an accomplished, strong, resilient, stable, serious person with a position, with power, with money. That's an alpha male, not a bodybuilder with two brain cells far apart. That's not an alpha male. That's an idiot. So women prefer these idiots, actually, and they prefer idiots without the musculature as well. They generally prefer inferior males, and they prefer them to alpha males who are well accomplished and supremely self-confident. How come? Well, an inferior man is less likely, far less likely, to reject a woman's sexual and romantic advances. That's the type of rejection that in most women causes narcissistic injury, emotional dysregulation, amidst a plummeting sense of self-worth and self-esteem. A weakling man allows the woman to occupy center stage as the life of the party, and a weakling male recedes to the shadows, to the background, as she gathers attention from others to her heart's content, while he remains silent, obsequious, and acquiescent. A whistle commonly grants the woman in his life the latitude to misbehave, owing to his abandonment and anxiety and limited options, bad self-esteem, self-confidence, and sense of self-worth, wrong self-perception, unrealistic self-perception, inferior, other mental health issues and problem, body dysmorphic disorder, in many cases. Such men are far more tolerant of abuse. They let the woman make all the decisions by herself, including egregiously immoral, bad or wrong decisions, without consulting the man or seeking his opinion or approval, even as an equal partner. As a tsunami of wounded women emerge from abusive and dysfunctional relationships, they seek mates and intimate partners who would not abuse them all over again, and who would allow them to assert control and exert dominance. They seek male partners who are not jerks, male partners who would not threaten them or their cherished victim stans, male partners who would not oppose their sense of unbounded entitlement, their alloplastic defenses. Yes, these women say, I cheated on him, but it was his fault, not mine, he abused me. So they are looking for men who would not abuse them and would not put them in such predicaments, presumably. Women have elevated narcissistic defenses, it's very common among suppressed minorities, emancipated suppressed minorities. These elevated narcissistic defenses now are coupled with psychopathic, defiant, anti-social behaviors. Women are becoming more and more borderline in secondary psychopaths. Finally, some women choose precisely such unattractive men because they are feeling so destructive and they want to trash themselves. It's bad, worthless, sluggish. Which leads me to the issue of attractiveness. Attractiveness is gender neutral. Of course, depending on the genders involved in the interaction, attractiveness may lead to sex, to romance, to bromance even, or to any other outcome on the spectrum of friendship and collaboration. But both men and women react with attraction or repulsion to other men and women. Attractiveness is a composite of character traits and behaviors, but to be deemed attractive, these have to conform to social and cultural mores, prejudices and preferences. Again, society and culture dictate. What would be considered attractive in one civilization would be judged very off-putting in another. Language plays a role as well. Stinginess can also be described as frugality, for example. Eloquence can be described as verbosity. Self-care can be described as vanity. Self-confidence is narcissism. The context is influential. Pure consensus is crucial. Women find more attractive men who are always in the company of other women. The time of day, alcohol consumption, events immediately preceding the encounter, all of them determine attractiveness. Surprisingly, body shape and good looks are less crucial and far more variable than they are made out to be by evolutionary biologists and pickup artists. In different parts of the world, opposite body shapes attract and the criteria of beauty are disparate. For example, in some parts of the world, the woman has to be full and curvy. Overweight, actually, in order to be considered attractive. In other parts of the world, lanky, elongated, straight-out men, thin, with their bones protruding, are considered very attractive. It seems that the mind plays the biggest role. The brain is indeed the largest sex organ. Remember that when you're watching me. Intelligence, resourcefulness, optimism, charisma, self-assurance, sense of humor, me, kindness, creativity, generosity, all these are far more critical than possessing the right kind of body. I would go the migtails, incels, red pillars, black pillars, and pickup artists and all the rest of the manuscript nonsense. So how would you explain that opposites attract? If there is a kind of societal cultural standard that is assimilated and then emulated by both genders, if they both adhere to the same playbook and the both on the same page, how can you explain that opposites attract? He's stingy, she's profligate, he's a reckless, she's gregarious, he's asexual, she's promiscuous. They're glaring in compatibilities in grossly mismatched couples. Why do people trap themselves in long-term relationships with their exact negations and polar opposites? Well, there are three reasons for that. Number one, the new inappropriate partner is chosen after a failed relationship precisely because he is the mirror image, the photographic negative of the previous disastrous choice. Contrast, overshadows, all other considerations, a sense of relief and safety ensues. Second reason, the mismatched partner provides an external locus of control and outsource regulation of traits and behaviors that are perceived as undesirable. He is a kind of check on unwanted aspects of one's personality. In the examples that I gave above, the profligate partner delegates money management to her frugal counterpart. The recluse uses his partner's gregariousness to meet people and the promiscuous husband restrains himself by remaining faithful to his frigid wife. The third reason for mismatched couples, the mismatch and obvious incompatibility, put paid to intimacy and usually in the longer haul also eliminate or decimate sex and love. These lacunas and legs, legs provide the partners with the moral justification to misbehave, to cheat on one another, to deceive one another, even to steal from each other. Socially unacceptable conduct is legitimized when you choose the wrong partner. We sympathize with the long-suffering intimate partner response and we tend to be more lenient in our judgment. People who fear intimacy or love it will make sure that their primary relationship never has any chance and strive to lead separate parallel lives. Choosing the wrong partner is setting the relationship up for failure. There's also another question when we come to gender in sex and mostly it is asked by women. Can a man interact with a woman without invoking sex? If he is not attracted to the woman or if he had initiated intimacy and had been rejected, possibly. But then he no longer regards the woman as a woman but as the other. For a man to perceive the other as a woman, to react to her femininity, the promise of sex, the potential for sex or actual sexual acts must exist. In their absence, the man recognizes merely the otherness of the woman. She has a different body, distinct cognitive and emotional process, eccentric decision making procedures. It is exotic, enigmatic, mysterious but it's not a woman. But to the man it's not a woman without sex. Every person, man or woman, is the other. An entire universe accessible only via language and empathy. Sex is a third mode of communication. It's a type of accessibility which alone, among all other modes of interaction, renders us men and women. Of course I'm talking about heterosexual couples. Of course, well-mannered men, especially in certain cultures and societies, go through the motions. They open doors, they give flowers or gifts, they court shiverlessly and they listen rupturously. These are all routines intended to disguise the yawning lack of interest that arises when the specter of sex is gone. Gradually, the part is drift apart. Sex is the glue that holds men, heterosexual men and women together. No sex, the frequency of the interaction and its character change dramatically. If to start with, the man does not find the woman attractive, there is a potential for friendship or companionship or collaboration. Sex does not get in the way. But even then, the relationship is among equals but different, not between a man and a woman. This is why in sexless marriages, 21% of all marriages, men and women end up being companions, roommates, partners in business, merely parents or good friends if they're lucky. But they no longer see each other as men and women, which only exacerbates the sexual aversion. I would like to propose a kind of tongue-in-chick typology of men and women. There are three types of women, homemakers, backpack adventurers and luxury cruisers. All women, including career women, belong to one of these three encampments. The homemaker derives happiness from home and heart, children and kitchen. Recent studies show that ever more women revert to these traditional roles as a refuge from the increasingly more menacing world. Women value stability and intimacy more than success, more than thrills, more than wealth, the homemakers. The backpack adventurer is a woman who is itinerant and peripatetic. She dreads stagnation, she feels suffocated in familiar settings and with too much intimacy. She travels light and sometimes alone. She is frugal and upstemious. She may choose professions such as war correspondent, diplomat, sales executive or volunteer in a charity. She answers to no one. She's very curious and cherishes her liberty and autonomy above all else. Many of these women end up being single or at best or at worst single mothers. The luxury cruiser loves comfort, loves opulence. She can be vulgar or have a refined taste. She can run her own business empire or be a serial gold digger. But her happiness consists in the freedom and safety that unlimited dopes of money and what you can buy afford her. She is into brands. She is into status symbol. She is very competitive, very envious. She climbs the social ladder one bit at a time. She is a huntress and a predator, often a fake femme fatale. Family, emotions, attachment and other such trappings pale insignificance besides her addiction to sumptuous consumption. Men come in a bewildering array of shapes, sizes and colors. Yet I think all men relate to women in one of four ways. Number one, the idealizer mystifier. This man regards women as mythical, magical creatures endowed with supernatural powers to mother, men hearts and break them. This man when rebuffed, become stalkers and he run to maniacs. The next type of man is what I call the woman lover. He loves and adores everything feminine. He is truly interested in women's persons, their lives, interests, emotions, thoughts. He considers women exotic and alluring but not alien and irresistible. Then there's a woman hater, the misogynist. He regards all women as rapacious, merciless, dangerous and narcissistic predators devoid of true emotions and loyalties. He fears women, loves women and holds women in unmitigated contempt. All women are for sale to the highest bidder. All women are whores and best avoided or enslaved as a precautionary measure. And finally there's the user. He considers women as mere utilitarian functions. He uses their bodies to masturbate with. He demands and expects to be worshiped by women. He absconds with their money. He leverages the business context. He's a psychopath. There the women's role in his life is to serve obediently and unthinkingly in a variety of roles. Sex slave, cook, maid, punching bag, witness to glorious accomplishments if he's a narcissist, acolyte or student. And there are four dysfunctional attitudes to women. The woman lover idealizes women and regards him as an enigmatic force of nature, a mysterious fount of fascinating magical otherness and a womblike and he seeks womblike immersion. He is addicted to women, their aesthetic, their smells, their voices, their rituals, their quirks, their emotions and of course their sex. He places each woman he meets at the crosshairs of his undivided, rupturous and breathless attention. The woman hater regards women as menacing, manipulative, dark, evil, scheming and heartless sorceresses out to pulverize his heart and deplete his wallet. He treats women with hostility and contempt that often morph into aggressive animosity. The nerdish drone treats women as men with a different set of genitalia. To him all women are strictly potential partners in the startup that is his life, toiling accomplices in a family, in a business and social functions. It's all work and no play. Relationships with these men are tedious and grinding, though could also be companionable and friendly. Not much fire there. Life is an endless stream of analysis, negotiations, rules and transactions, till death do them part. The narcissist homes in and captures women to be his slaves, sex dolls, service providers and captive audience to his grandiose schemes and fantastic exploits. He abhors women, he fears women and is enraged by independent-minded women who pursue their own self-actualization and refuse to adulate him uncritically. He is the center of attention, the star, and women are his mere peripheral satellites or else. Women, on the other hand, have their own cognitive biases. They regard all men as raw materials, coarse, at times fatuous and necessarily aggressive and invariably pure adolescent. Inevitably, women end up being frustrated, disappointed and enraged when they fail to shape, mold, educate, reform, direct manipulate or teach the men in their lives. Women regard all women as hopelessly finished products beyond logic, growth or transformation. They accept the women in their lives as frivolous, flawed, inexplicable, enigmatic, irrational, manipulative and capricious beings. So women regard men as raw material to be molded and shaped into the finished product. Men regard women as finished products, hopeless. Men do their best to work around the true rigid and fully formed nature of their females. Both misperceptions yield inefficient coping strategies and lead to erroneous decisions. The hostile gap between men and women has never gone bigger. As women encroach on traditionally male territory and adopt male roles of male behaviors, the misunderstanding is multiplied. We are very near a tipping point of total disconnect between men and women. This is one thing. Our species will not survive. Forget COVID. Some heterosexual women intensely dislike and reject their gender or even their sex. This usually has to do with a developed sense of competitiveness, with competitiveness with other women. It is kind of internalized misogyny. Some of the biggest women haters that I've ever come across were women. Identifying with women haters, especially in sexist and chauvinistic families or societies, has an adoptative value and guarantees favorable outcomes. Women are reified by the vagina, which is described by misogynists as dark, rancid, wet, deep, contaminated, emanations, like the medieval vagina and tata, vagina with teeth. Even children, women's main and prized distinction, do not appeal to women who hate women and are perceived as freedom-denying burdens. Female misogynists, like men a lot, identify with them. They seek to emulate them. Men are epitomized by the penis, which is viewed by such women as clean, erect, visible and proud. Masculine qualities are praiseworthy. Men are protectors and providers. The sexual style of female misogynist is also close to the stereotypes of men than women. They hunt for men. They tease aggressively. They fuck perfectorily and selfishly. They get up and leave after the sex. Their sex involves infatuation and idealization, but rarely any true, deep and lasting emotion. These kind of women are interested in things and pursuits that typically interest men. Still, the female misogynist is a woman, so she hates this aspect of herself. She casts a femininity as horish, bad, labile and risky. She would tend to be sociosexually unrestrictive. From miscreas, the female misogynist tends to pair with a male woman-hater. After all, they share the same view of women. Yet she believes that he should treat her as the only exception. But when he does treat her as the exception, when it relates to her as the only woman who is as good as a man, and therefore avoids having sex with her, or refrains from courting her because he doesn't have sex with a man, she resents him. She takes revenge on him and punishes him, behaving exactly like a typical woman and further justifying her misogyny. It's a no-win situation. Part of it has been brought on by feminism. Feminism caricatured men into a one-dimensional stereotype, and women now aspire to become that caricature. Women drink heavily, curse profusely, are in your face fuck you antisocial and defiant, promiscuously indiscriminately engaged in emotionless one-night stents. Women become a walkaholic. They cheat on their intimate partners. They generally act as grandiose and entitled narcissists, not to say psychopaths, devoid of any hint of empathy. When confronted about their egregious misconduct, women respond indignantly by saying, what is this double standard? This is what men always did, no? We're entitled to behave this way as well. And the answer is, of course this is not what men always did. Only some men behave this way, and they are widely frowned upon, decried and held in contempt by the vast majority of other men. Men and women should be utterly equal when it comes to all public goods, education, healthcare. They should have the same rights, access, wages paid, economic opportunities. The law should treat them equally. Authorities should treat them equally. Society should treat them equally. They should be equal, but different. Gender differences are the poetry, the engine of life itself. Sexual attraction, family formation, procreation, romantic love, they all crucially depend on differences between the genders. But now women want to be identical to men, not merely equal. And this threatens the very existence of a species, and what is much worse. In their attempts to emulate men, women use the feminist sexist caricature of the typical man as a template. A drunk, a vulgar, men or womanizer who cheats on his powers, works himself to death in a jungle, hostile universe. That's not men. It's a caricature of men. Women have learned to mistrust men. About half of them are bitter and broken victims of abuse, divorce, single marbles, impoverished, hopeless. So we have men go their own way, big tau, a movement in the atmosphere of men who renounce all contact with women. And this is merely a reaction to the fact that women have gone their own way a long time ago, as I said in other videos. There are no women left. They're only narcissists with different genitalia, different genital apparatus. How tragic that we have lost each other, men and women. How heartbreaking. Men are giving up on women and resorting even to other men for intimacy in sex. It's not an accident that homosexuality, homoeroticism, same-sex attraction, masturbation to pornography, and men having sex with men, MSM, have been increasing 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, only men. Women dress like men, curse like men, drink like men, as promiscuous and aggressive as men, as narcissistic and disempathic as men, cheat on their spouses as men, intimate partners as men. And so they've become the primary breadwinners. They're taking over many traditional blue-collar and white-collar male vocations. They're single mothers. They're better educated than men. They become men, unigender. They're only men with penises, men with vaginas. They're no women. So some men go for the original. Why opt for the imitation? And Freud predicted all this mayhem inadvertently when he described penis envy. He said that women feeling complete without the male appendage and unconsciously attempt to emulate men, nonsense of course, but a good metaphor. 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 at least. The emotions, reactive patterns are clearer, more predictable, tolerance is higher, mutual expectations way more realistic, much easier to gratify. Consequently, men are ignoring and discarding women and droves in a variety of ways. Most women now go without a man for years at a time and are reduced to picking up strangers in bars for one night's tense. I attribute the disappearance of sex to four developments. Gender vertigo, the shifting gender roles and the ensuing gender wars, which engender sexual disorientation. Number two, the rise of addictive social media, online games, immersive, augmentative artificial intelligence and similar technologies. Number three, the wide availability of pornography. Number four, the emergence of casual, motionless sex as a preferred sexual practice, the decline of intimacy. Explosion of dating apps and dating sites proves how impossibility is to obtain sex in one's milieu. People have to go online, they have to hook up with strangers, often in other countries, in a desperate bid to gratify this most basic and natural of needs. Companionship, sex, love, investing in a relationship may have become a rational strategy in this day and age. Print-ups made community property obsolete. Divorce is not so new normal and it's much easier than it used to be. Children are accustomed to divorce and have learned to expect and accept breakups as an ineluctable, preordained part of life and definitely of marriage. Sex has become cost-free and has 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. There's nothing else today. The pool of available partners is practically infinite. Mate selection is no longer affected by scarcity and the fear of remaining alone. People have become commodified, disposable, dispensable, interchangeable, swipe left. Digital identities on social media and dating sites are largely fake. People flaunt each other with accurate information on the trifling aspects of their lives, but they lie through their teeth and egregiously about all the critical issues, from how they look to STDs, socially transmitted diseases. It renders intimacy not only impossible but dangerous. And men have casual sex mostly for two reasons. The woman makes clear that she is available and they find the woman attractive. Period. They make no bones about it and they feel no need to spin complex stories to embed the sex in some exculpatory context. We have broken apart and now we are breaking down. Our gender roles have become as fluid as our sexuality and in a world with no compass and no orientation. This is a threat to the institutions which were used to raise children and without children there's no future and without future there's no species. This is the true pandemic, not the derisive COVID-19.