 Hi everyone, my name is Stephanie Welch and my talk is called Tribal Living, How Might, An Ancestrally Inspired, Gender Segregated Housing Model Outperform the Nuclear Family as the Basic Domestic Unit of Society. I'm going to be asking you to do some experimental thinking with me here today because my proposal challenge is not only how we think about homes, but about relationships, families, paternity, and the value of domestic labor and femininity. It goes against a lot of norms in our society, but that's because it goes back to ways of living that we haven't seen for thousands of years. Fortunately, I know you all are on board with me on this. Okay, a little about me. My formal education includes degrees in Classics and Art History and a decade of experience in hands-on bodywork as a massage therapist. I've studied and dabbled in many other things along the way, but for as long as I can remember, understanding human nature has been my hobby, my passion, and my purpose in life. To me, the key has always been in using an evolutionary lens to understand and reduce our modern mismatch problems, whether it be in the realms of nutrition, biomechanics and physical development, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, or sexuality. Along this path, for those of you who've known me since my first AHS back in Berkeley 2014, you might have noticed that I've also gone through some personal evolution over the years. And this process has been absolutely critical to what I'm here to share. From shoes are not paleo, to circumcision is not paleo, to evolutionary feminism, these are just a few of the terms that I've used to describe and define what I do and what I've studied over the years. I call myself a disruptive anthropologist because my curiosity about how humans work and the links I've gone to to learn about it are not bound by the limits of social convention. But I've also learned that we not only want to disrupt what's going on currently, but to take what we've learned and build something better. So now I've been using the term re-civilized woman because it's not that we just want to revert to our old ways, it's saying, look, we've done this civilization thing one way, and it turns out it's got some flaws. So let's use the wisdom of evolution and help us see how we might re-civilize ourselves and do something better in the future. Okay, some overview. What I want to talk to you about today is how we physically structure the way that we live in society. And what I mean is how we divide ourselves up into buildings, what we call our homes, which also delineate where we pool resources and whom we share those resources with. The way we choose to range ourselves in these environments has a huge impact on our ability to meet our needs and maximize human potential. This is incredibly important to me because it's actually also the key to how we correct for the imbalances in power and resource distribution that contribute to the sense of patriarchy and women's disempowerment that we experience in our culture. This is the basis of my concept of evolutionary feminism. You see, women are actually programmed to be extremely cooperative with one another while employing sexual rewards as a way to enlist male cooperation and resources. This all has to do with our evolutionary reproductive strategies and how we lived in ways that supported this. So let me explain. Here are some key differences between female and male reproductive strategies that influenced our social evolution. As women, we can only produce in general a maximum of around 10 to 20 offspring in a lifetime, whereas men have an effectively unlimited capacity for offspring, the only limitation being the number of fertile females that they have access to. This limitation is due in large part to the fact that women have, upon fertilization, a minimum of a nine-month investment, whereas men's initial investment is miniscule and they can go on to the next almost without delay. As a result, women cannot increase their rate of reproduction by slowing other women down, whereas every man's success is every other man's failure. On top of this, because the woman is already so obligated by the first nine months and the offspring is now dependent on adult caring guidance for at least the next 10 years or so, it's to her advantage to enlist the support of as many other caretakers as possible to protect that investment, whereas the man could theoretically conserve his resources for only pursuing other fertile females since he knows the mother is already so obligated to invest in this one. One of the most highly instructive observations is that evolutionarily speaking, an offspring dependent stage, the last for over a decade, could only have developed within a robust system of caretakers. One or even two invested parents is simply far too reproductively risky to have contributed to such an extensive evolutionary development. Furthermore, human reproduction is not merely a nine-month process, but one that lasts our entire lives as we contribute resources to the survival of our lineage through all its dependent stages as children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. Because of this combination of factors, chiefly the hefty reproductive investment and benefits of working together, the evolutionary pressure on women was toward cooperation or socialism. Men on the other hand, whose reproduction was more opportunistic and who could technically get away with investing less, experienced more evolutionary pressure toward competition or capitalism and conserving their own resources. So what I believe makes it all work together as beautifully as it did to bring modern humanity to where we are are the social and sexual dynamics that lead to resource distribution that maximally serves the tribe as a reproductive unit. There it goes. Now let's talk about resources. Before agriculture, nomadic hunter-gatherers didn't own land. They couldn't accumulate much property because of the need to carry it from place to place. And they couldn't build permanent structures in which to divide up wealth and pass it down by lineage. Because people weren't tied to permanent houses, resources couldn't be segregated and were thus communally shared, including that children didn't belong to just one set of parents, but to the whole tribe. Because reproduction was a function of the tribe, not just of biological parents, human women expanded the function of sex from mere fertilization to a method by offering or denying sexual rewards to keep men invested and influence their behavior in the community. Relationships could come and go with ease, allowing women the freedom to exert this power because no one had to move out or pay child support in order to change sexual partners. But as agriculture developed, people began segregating themselves into nuclear family-based housing that competed with one another for resources. So why? Contrary to many assumptions, I believe this new arrangement didn't occur because men demanded control over women. Rather, I think it came about because a man who could, through agriculture, single-handedly provide a lifetime of support for a woman, and all of her children was mind-bogglingly attractive to a hunter-gatherer woman. So much so that she was willing to move in and agree to something as diametrically opposed to our social evolution as offering him sexual monogamy and hence allowing him to know which children were biologically his, at least most of the time, and direct his resources to only them. And the thing is, because this arrangement, this post-agricultural, nuclear family-based, sexually-exclusive domestic environment became so much a part of the canvas of our lives, no one even really stops to ask what needs should our living environment attempt to fulfill and how can that best be done? So that's what we're actually going to look at today. I've attempted to propose several criteria which I believe a home ought to try to provide for its residents. We'll first go over what those criteria might be, and then we'll take a look at the differences in how the nuclear family model seems to be meeting them as compared to a more tribal model that I propose which takes into account the views of evolutionary feminism. We spend a large percentage of our time at home, and thus the domestic environments have tremendous influence on our daily lives. So the question is, what criteria do we want a home to fulfill? What needs do we want it to provide for? I propose that in an ideal situation, our domestic environment should support the following three categories of criteria. Number one, health criteria, number two, social criteria, and number three, growth criteria. Health is familiar to us and covers several of the most basic elements that we normally include in a paleo or ancestral health approach. These would include nutrition, movement and fitness, sleep, and circadian rhythm optimization. Today, instead of looking only at how to modify individual behavior to improve our performance in these areas, we're going to look at how the structure of the home environment itself influences the individual's ability to meet these criteria. Second is social criteria, which is coming to attention as more people note that social relationships are actually the number one predictor of health outcomes. And my suggestion for the criteria that a domestic environment should provide are providing for daily companionship, supporting child rearing, supporting romantic relationships and sexual expression, and encouraging community building. Third, in addition to fulfilling health and social criteria, the domestic environment is also the place where interpersonal and interpersonal development takes place. So I additionally suggest the following criteria of providing an environment that caters to growth by maintaining and passing on knowledge and skills, providing positive role models for other society members, and creating healthy competition to encourage striving for improvement. So let's move on to the assessment of the nuclear family. Although we hear about family values as a big political topic, this could actually mean much more than what we've assumed in the past. Before deciding whether the model that we're accustomed to is even worth saving, we should consider whether it is effectively meeting any of the above criteria that we just said a domestic environment should provide. Now I listed health first initially, but that's because that's what we're most familiar with here in the ancestral health environment, but actually as we pointed out, social relationships are turning out to be an even bigger predictor of health outcomes than individual choices. And since they're part of what makes up our domestic environment itself, I actually want to reverse the order and start with this criteria. So let's take providing for daily companionship. In the nuclear family, adult companionship is usually only available from the romantic partner or in single-family households, no one. This can create high demands on the attention from a partner, which can contribute to stress on the relationship. At the same time, seeking outside support, going out for girls' nights and guys' nights out, for example, detracts from already limited attention available at home. So that's a challenge to get all your companionship from either one person in the home or take time to find it elsewhere. Then there's supporting childbearing. First, we already mentioned earlier that the fact that the human childhood dependence stage lasts for a decade or more could only have developed within a robust system of caretakers. So one or two invests in parents is simply far too risky to have created this in an evolutionary environment. And to have as few as two caretakers is already automatically a huge evolutionary mismatch for a child. Furthermore, unlike in tribal society where men did not know which children were theirs, so they supported the whole community, now men's resources are directed based on paternity. This really limits the pool of people that women can draw on for support of their children. Then there's the question of who will take care of the children while the parents are out earning the living to pay for the childcare that being out earning a living requires, which is a bit of a catch-22 and very economically inefficient. So the obvious question at this point is, well, why don't we just solve this by putting more people in one house? And that is actually part of what I'm getting at with the tribal model, but with an important caveat, which is the gender segregated aspect that I alluded to in the title of this presentation. This is different than the common suggestions of increasing caretakers by either bringing back more extended families, having multiple couples living together, or expanding on existing relationships through polyamory. The problem, as we're about to discuss, is that all of these arrangements continue to be built around cohabitation with romantic partners, and often with ties to biological paternity. Here's where we find one of the most serious pitfalls of the nuclear family-based domestic environment. I hate to say it, but this is important to recognize. Cohabitation is very dangerous to romantic relationships. That doesn't mean it's always fatal, but the fairy tale ideal, which we treat as both the solution and the goal, distracts us from seeing the dangers it presents. When longtime couples seek therapy, what does the therapist tell you to do to reinvigorate the relationship, to return to how you behaved when you were dating, to go out together, to put in more effort, to strive, to impress, and attract your mate? So the intent here is to combat complacency, but the very fact of moving in together and promising to stay together no matter what is what sets the stage for complacency in the first place. When you promise to love and support one another forever, you're saying that no matter how old and fat and lazy you get, I'll always stay with you. But when it comes to romantic relationships, the only way to encourage effort is to make it not a guarantee to stay together. In addition to encouraging complacency, cohabitation detracts from romance and seduction by embroiling the couple in the mundanities of everyday life, by making time spent together the default option taken for granted instead of specially and intentionally planned, and it makes it very difficult for both people to maintain a firm commitment to their own personal needs and boundaries in the relationship. The key to any negotiation, like one in a romantic relationship, is being willing and able to walk away from the table and say no deal. But when this means having to move out, get divorced and battle for custody and child support, we inevitably start by making small compromises instead of staying true to our needs, and over time these compound and fester and undermine the relationship. Now we think we want this because we also want the assurance that we'll both have economic support in the near term and also won't be alone when we get older, which are good points, but this does not mean living with your romantic partner is the only way to meet them and we'll get back to this with the tribal model. In the meantime, the important point is living together is one of the most challenging things we can do to a romantic relationship. When it comes to encouraging community building, with all the demands of work and child care stretching one or two adults thin already, we have little time to get to know our neighbors, but worse we're afraid of them. This again goes back to cohabitating and relying on domestic support from our romantic partners. If we are depending on the faithfulness of our mate to keep the limited resources we have within our household, every other potential competitor for his or her attention represents a potential threat to our livelihood. We may not always want to admit it, but the deep-seated fear is often there, and this is the exact opposite recipe needed for cooperation and community building. So the social challenges of living in the nuclear family pair bonded household are many. What about the health aspects? Well, with most adults working outside the home, hardly anyone has the time or energy to cook healthy meals with regularity. On top of all our other responsibilities, it's really hard to shop with values, to get to the farmer's market consistently, to choose the best and healthiest options, to set aside time to prepare them, and to do so before your groceries spoil. So we compromise on food often. Similarly, time and energy for fitness is lacking due to the high demands of home, work, children, and partner. Since this relationship model centers around permanence and monogamy, there's also little incentive to try to be physically fit to impress the partner, since they've promised they won't leave us, and it's going to be really hard for them to move out. In fact, pursuing fitness and attractiveness at a higher level can even appear as evidence of cheating. Just who are you trying to impress? And of course, we know how chronically sleep-deprived many people are. It's often an afterthought, as two people trying to work, run a household, and raise children barely have time for themselves, if there are two in the first place. Stress leads to fighting with the romantic partner, which leads to even more lost sleep and strain on the relationship. At this level of challenge and deficit, trying to manage circadian rhythm is often entirely out of the question. So to keep going with growth criteria, we have challenges there as well. When I saw in my household growing up, and I've witnessed for many parents since then, is that people often take the easy route of doing things for children? Because it takes less time and energy than teaching them. Too often, with the pressure to get things done efficiently, kids are handed the screen of hyper-stimulating entertainment instead of being incorporated into daily activities. This problem continues to get worse over time, as each successive family unit becomes more and more isolated and detached from the ancient knowledge and wisdom handed down by our ancestors. As for positive role models, again, with only two adults typically present, children are short on role models as well. This also compounds every generation. If the current role models are sub-optimal and few other adults are present in their lives to compare with, children are likely to perform successively worse than the last generation on this when they in turn become adults. In addition, because of the social deficits we discussed, we spend most of our time relating to fictional versions of other people instead of reality. Among adolescents and adults, the daily struggles of peers are rarely seen, while Facebook and Instagram paint fantasies of the lives of others. Depression and anxiety result from fear of missing out and comparing ourselves to imaginary ideals of how everyone else is succeeding more than we are. These deficiencies reduce our social skills even further. And competition is seen as a nearly universal negative, as we are trapped in a scarcity mindset, where everything we're holding together depends on keeping our home and relationship exactly the way it is, unchallenged by others. Concepts like body shaming even come into play here, as suggesting or striving for evolutionarily driven aesthetic values is seen as shallow. There's no room to spur each other on to our better selves if that just means our friends will then be even stronger competition for our domestic partners. To top it off, when the nuclear family model does frequently self-distract, this leaves everyone feeling like a failure. If we only realize that the model itself was largely to blame, perhaps we could be a little bit easier on ourselves. So the nuclear family does not seem to be performing well at these criteria. The alternative model I propose, which is of course controversial, involves bringing together same-sex, nonromantically involved adults into the same domestic environment rather than romantic mother-father pair bonds. This model also suggests a return to mothers taking primary responsibility for children, which happens to be consistent with our biology, and male participation in child care being voluntary and distributed rather than mandatory and limited by biological paternity. The way this is accomplished is by, instead of men supporting the children they've individually fathered, they return to supporting the communities of the women whose company they want to enjoy. At the same time, women in turn distribute resources amongst their own households, addressing all levels of multi-generational support according to their needs. So the question is, how might this gender segregated model, more like our tribal origins, be able to fulfill although previously discussed criteria more effectively than the nuclear family model does? Returning to social criteria, we can look at how a household of women or men working together might operate differently than one based around a romantic pair. For women in particular, the key evolutionary pressure as we discussed was based around a reproductive strategy of high resource investment in a small number of offspring. Unable to speed up our own rates of reproduction by slowing other women down, and vastly increasing the chances of our offspring surviving by increasing the number of adults invested in their care, women are deeply viscerally programmed to cooperate with one another, and this presents a huge opportunity if we share resources within the same household. I've personally experienced that coming together with other women can be very powerful. I have heard the same for men who participate in men's groups. The openness and ability to express oneself with authenticity often drastically exceeds that found in co-ed situations. So this provides a significant opportunity for increased daily companionship. With regard to child care, having multiple adults, especially multiple women and especially multi-generationally available for child care is a huge advantage. With women living together, the number of caretakers in the household can increase to the capacity of the living space without creating the complications of housing romantic relationships under the same roof that we discussed earlier. This ability to distribute the domestic workload among more than two adults could be invaluable and greatly increase our freedom to pursue our dreams even with children on board, as some can participate in child care while others pursue alternative activities, taking turns so each person has access to many opportunities. To return to the issue of romantic relationships, although it requires a significant mental shift from the approach of monogamous cohabitation, this is one of the greatest opportunities we have to change the state of male-female power dynamics and get everyone more of what they want out of romantic relationships. The biggest limitation on women's empowerment, in my opinion, is in the realm of sexual empowerment. Since agriculture, women have been working on the assumption that their sexual choices were the bedrock of their domestic stability. Disengaging these elements is one of the most liberating things a woman can experience. If a woman knows that she has the freedom to make sexual choices without disrupting her home, she can be much more relaxed about those choices. And instead of putting men on the hook for any potential pregnancy that might result, because she gets her primary child care support through her community, she can instead expect more from how he treats her in the moment rather than trying to tie him down forever. We mentioned that couples therapy sometimes involves returning to how one would act before living together. So what if we simply left things in the pre-cohabitative state instead of moving together in the first place? What if every time you wanted to go out with someone you actually had to impress them? What if you had to show up as your best self and they as well because you both had the freedom to change your mind without serious repercussions? What if we all held higher expectations of one another and helped each other understand what we were looking for so we could work on delivering it? It would be a big step up to not taking each other for granted anymore. At the same time, because our value of knowledge and wisdom to our same-sex community actually goes up with our age, whereas our sexual value to potential romantic partners tends to go down with age, relying on a gender segregated community for long-term support makes more sense than asking of it from the romantic partner. On community building, how much more incentive would we have to get to know our neighbors if they were the pool of potential romantic partners instead of having that role fulfilled at home? And what if the attraction we had for them did not threaten our own domestic environments? I believe the idea of visiting our neighbors more often when they're attractive and not threats to our domesticity presents a huge opportunity. In fact, it represents a huge sift in how we think about getting our needs met if we're working collectively rather than each person for themselves when it comes to romantic partner seeking and how this brings resources into our household. If communities of men seek to support communities of women, we can distribute the economic resources and burdens in a way that allows more people to get what they want out of life. Getting back to health benefits, an increased number of domestic inhabitants also greatly improves the chances that we can work together on prioritizing health goals. There's great benefit to being able to specialize and delegate duties that can be scaled like shopping and cooking, but which are very time intensive for only one or two individuals. With more time and shared responsibilities, plus the motivation to keep in shape since we're not taking for granted the presence of a permanent monogamous partner, the likelihood of prioritizing fitness goes up. Also, among similarly physically advantaged same-sex peers, fitness can be a more appealing social activity encouraging us to partake more readily with a healthy form of competition. This is actually a noteworthy point because it's not the case when women are pitted against men in physical or other contests. Men invariably lose face when competing with women as to beat a girl and to lose to a girl both reflect poorly on him. When it comes to sleep and circadian rhythm, if we could reduce and distribute the daily demand so that there's enough energy to go around and address all the other health needs, there may be a lot more time for sleep. In addition, with the romantic partners not being given, we have more motivation to continue developing all aspects of health as they relate to attractiveness toward our non-cohabitating partners. And without the stress that comes from tension in the romantic relationship at home, we can also focus more on taking care of ourselves when we are at home. In passing on knowledge and skills with a network of community members we can connect to more readily as well as distributed labor with more caretakers in our households, we have access to many more people to learn from and we can have time available for this kind of teaching and learning. This photo shows one of my favorite kinds of performance to witness, the Maori haka dance, a traditional male display of strength, ferocity and unity. This activity is a way for men to come together to provide positive role models to support the growth and development of younger members of the community. I can't decide which is more attractive, the actual physical display or the idea that they're teaching and bringing up the youth through guidance and rites of passage into what it means to be a warrior. So imagine an environment in which we have both stability of our domestic environment independent of our sexual choices and at the same time no guarantees of success with romantic partners, but instead a host of role models surrounding us to learn from and the impetus to always strive for improvement. We have to continuously work at being good romantic partners in order to maintain our relationships but we also know that we're not relying on them as our sole means of support for the rest of our lives. Women's cooperative instincts are maximized to create stability for children while men urge each other toward optimal efforts and behavior because the opportunities to impress women, including by providing resources and good examples for their children, are limitless and not constricted by monogamy. The focus is on equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. At the very least it can't provide much worse outcomes than our current system, can it? So I've shared with you what I think are valid criteria for a domestic environment to be judged by. We looked at how the pair bonded monogamous nuclear family unit as a household basis does not seem to be fulfilling them. I'm sure I've left many unanswered questions in this short attempt to describe a more ancestral tribal model of a household, but I'm curious if you think as I do that if thoughtfully enacted perhaps this tribal and evolutionary based model might outperform the nuclear family at meeting our needs and helping us to unlock human potential. Thank you very much. Great talk. We have time for some questions. Stephanie, I won't make a question as this is a straight comment. The brilliant, thank you very much, is was answering you encapsulated what I already do and think perfectly. You know, you widened my mind on a direction that I was already thinking but I live with my partner, her sister, we've got two kids, we have a work colleague stays half the time, we have an aunt that's been staying for the last year and the whole thing flows so much better. With my people? Yeah, well half the time I've got my nephew staying with me and so we have a five, a four and a three-year-old that's fun, too much and it just works, it really does. Sometimes we go out one night, we instantly have a baby sitter, you don't have to worry about it, there's no planning, it's no stress then when we don't want to get up in the morning I just lock the door, don't worry about what the kids are going to do in the morning, I know someone's going to like after them is going to get sorted. Literally I couldn't do the work I do in a normal nuclear family, I couldn't have achieved it, I couldn't have got where I am today with a nuclear family, it would have been too stressful, difficult and it just works brilliantly. Thank you very much. Thank you. I also think that cohabitation will take care of a lot of things that we are deeply missing. I'm a parent and I've suffered from a lot of the things you talked about. I did want to say something about co-dependence and if you don't realize that you're responsible for your own happiness then a monogamous relationship can be a particularly horrific place for those co-dependencies to play out but I'm not sure that is the fault of the monogamy and I think that there can be problems in polyamory that aren't necessarily fixed. For example, if you think that you have to compete with other people at all times and that you're going to lose attention from your loved ones, if you've taken a bad health turn or if you are pregnant, this can be a strain on a relationship that might not be ideal as well. Yeah and so the the model that I'm talking about, I would differentiate it from polyamory and actually part of it is to not be attempting to rely primarily on those romantic partners as the base of support so that's part of where it's coming from is you're creating a household that is not dependent on the romantic partner and so it's protective of some of the things that maybe you're saying like the taking a bad turn or the idea of the getting older and all that because you're relying domestically on somebody who's not that's not your primary engagement with them. I think that's great. One of the things that was a great life changer for me was realizing that I didn't need to get all of my needs met from one person and when you've gone through a divorce you can suddenly see where you have done that and where you haven't so yeah thank you. Hi Alyssa. Hey Stephanie thank you for your courageous and crazy ideas I love it. Okay so I just I'm just curious why you're thinking that the gender segregation is ancestral because I think actually the the the idea that we evolved through these cooperative tribal situations rather than pairs is absolutely uncontroversial but when you look at like the extant anthropological comparison you see a lot of variation actually in how much men are involved in childrearing ranging from like nothing to all the time there with the children as much as the women are so I'm yeah I'm just curious like is there not like other is there not another model say of communal living that would not be gender segregated that would work as well. Yeah so the biggest thing that is the issue is how resources are managed and that they're tied to like the households that we live in that's what has complicated this because yeah in the ancestral model that was part of the point earlier on is that we weren't divided up by households that were competing internally or against each other when in households so essentially as long as we want to continue using houses as a way to organize ourselves the it's it's trying to come up with a way to get a little bit closer to some of the things that we had in that more communal environment in the first place and if we're going to pick people to put in a house and to have the basis of that house is resources that are working together this is an attempt to get a little bit closer it's not again that's the re-civilized aspect is it's not trying to go back and create the exact same original model and the idea again being that if we set it up in a way that visiting our neighbors was more more necessary and appealing maybe we could actually get a lot more interaction than we have had when we've been kind of secluding ourselves based on that nuclear unit so there's the two ways that it's trying to come at that so thanks. Hi Marty. Stephanie that was fantastic. I just want to dovetail off Dr. Mew inspired me to say how some of these things can actually happen in our lives in an organic fashion so Stephanie has impacted my life for the last two or three years just getting an opportunity to hear about her theories so I was about to divorce my husband and he had a girlfriend and so eventually she ended up living with us before the divorce was final and we he was on the way out I didn't push him out in an aggressive fashion because I was raising finishing raising his son my stepson 17 years old at that time trying to get him through high school so as it turned out this gal and a couple of times when you and I have been together she's called me with issues so it's it's very interesting I didn't realize how much this kind of just feeling less competitive even with my first husband for some reason I was not feeling competitive about other women I thought that was unusual about me so as it turned out this woman in the household and then my ex-husband has just naturally gone to live somewhere else but she has taken up part of the mothering role for my stepson so when I was too busy to do things she would drive him places and and do things for him so my lack of competitiveness regarding her made it easy for the whole thing to dissolve into a better you know the the marriage dissolve and now she's still in the household being supportive and it's I understand that's just a small slice of what you're talking about here but the it's untenable trying to financially afford these households the way we have them now and as you clearly said and it's so true people put too much responsibility on the spouse and then not knowing the neighbors so have you seen other situations that have started to blossom in this fashion and or do you have households or or living situations that you envision for the future well yeah that's that's part of what I'm hoping to create in Austin so I've been working on moving there for a while and creating environments like this so the the term Amazonia is our the term that we've been using for the style of women living together and it's complementary counterpart affectionately has been called Manzonia to create create groups that that can create this kind of so the two houses just as you said here that's how it's a little different from just polyamory yes it's definitely different from polyamory it's yeah it's it's splitting the splitting the relationship out of the household model so you inspired me and just help my household just kind of settle into something quite different so thanks thank you hi Brett hi Stephanie you know i'm going to ask you the the tough one right so with monogamy which may have led to the rise of civilization you had to kind of fitness matching it's called we're tens pair bond with tens eight pair bonds with other eights and so on down more or less that's what happens people can accumulate wealth and transmitted across generations what what would happen in this scenario if it were a happen at a large scale certain men would might get shut out of the reproductive around and they would become the term now is in sales or like sexual refusenics what would what would prevent the build up of these surplus males they're not as attractive from running around causing trouble yeah i actually agree that is a serious problem that we need to address and that's part of the intent here is to actually find ways to do that and by taking it for women taking it upon ourselves to help facilitate and encourage and teach and reach out to men who are having difficulty like that and between resources like the even the jeffrey miller and tucker max's book mate that's like a advice for guys i distribute more copies of that book definitely for people who want to support that for men who want to support the communities but maybe they have some challenges that would be one of the things that i would believe in as encouraging women working together to help guys who are struggling and try to try to teach try to share try to like that one of the things i mentioned earlier in terms of like helping share what we want and help encourage them to provide it so that we can actually kind of raise everybody up on this that's all the time we have for questions now thank you so much stephanie thank you