Jordan Peterson: preference

Transcript context

…What’s the cause and effect there? It’s a loop. Men are motivated to attain social status because it confers upon them reproductive success. And that’s not only cognitively, but biologically. I’ll give you an example of this. There’s a documentary I watch from time to time, which I think is the most brilliant documentary I’ve ever seen. It’s called Crumb, and it’s the story of this underground cartoonist. Robert Crumb, who in high school was in the category of males for whom a date was not only not likely, but unimaginable. So he was at the bottom of the bottom rung, and almost all the reactions he got from females wasn’t just no, it was like, “Are you out of your mind?” With that contempt. And then he became successful. And so the documentary is super interesting because it tracks the utter pathology of his sexual fantasies because he was bitter and resentful. And if you want to understand the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like, and you watch Crumb, you’ll find out a lot more about that than anybody with any sense would want to know. But then he makes this transition, and partly because he does take the heroic adventure path, and he actually has a family and children, and he is actually a pretty functional person as opposed to his brothers, one of whom commits suicide, and one of whom is literally a repeat sexual offender. It’s a brutal documentary. But what he did in his adolescence after being rejected was he found what he was interested in. He was a very good artist. He was very interested in music, and he started to pursue those single-mindedly, and he became successful. And as soon as he became successful, and the documentary tracks this beautifully, he’s immediately attractive to women. And then you might ask too, even if you’re cynical, it’s like, “Well, why do I have to perform for women?” And the answer to that is something like, why the hell should they have anything to do with you if you’re useless? They’re going to have infants. They don’t need another one. Partly the reason that women are hypergamous, they want males who are of higher status than they are, is because they’re trying to redress the reproductive burden. And it’s substantial. The female of any species is the sex that devotes more to the reproductive function. That’s a more fundamental definition than chromosomal differentiation. And that’s taken to its ultimate extreme with humans. And so of course women are going to want someone around that’s useful, because the cost of sex for them is an 18 year-old period of dependency with an infant. So I think the adventure comes first. Heroic adventure comes first.…

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