Join us as we dive into an intriguing conversation about the phenomenon of Rule 34 and fandoms, particularly focusing on the "My Little Pony" fandom. Malcolm and Simone discuss evolutionary pressures that could contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon, addressing arousal patterns, societal norms, cultural traditions, and much more.
Transcript:
Simone: [00:00:00] the first impression that the internet gets is, oh my God, you sick, disgusting monsters.
Simone: How are you turned on? By cartoon ponies, and what you're saying is actually the people turned on by these cartoon ponies are actually very good. Like they're, they're triggered by instincts. Driven by being a very good, committed partner
Malcolm: I'm sorry I don't consume my little pony porn.
Malcolm: I, I'm, I'm, I'm a terror. This is,
Simone: this is probably one of your greatest downsides. Think about all that, that, that is recommended about these, these gentlemen here and true gentlemen is the
Malcolm: word really. Men of class and, and men,
Simone: no men of class and distinction. Checking with me and like the whole gradation of, of genres of this type of material.
Simone: I have to say, hats off to these guys
Simone: Hello, gorgeous.
Malcolm: Hello, Simone. I come to you today dressed as an intellectual. Hello. Because people have said [00:01:00] we are intellectuals.
Simone: Well, LA
Malcolm: Doll, well, I don't know, like elite, not an intellectual elites. This is, this is the brand we have publicly, I guess. So this is an elite conversation.
Simone: Elite, if that counts as what Yahoo News calls us in scare quotes. In scare quotes. Yes, elites. Well, tell me, Mr. Elite, intellectual, what have you been reading about today?
Malcolm: Well, so there was this poll on Reddit, which was going through the different fandoms that people create, R 34 artwork of. So R 34 is based on the internet rule, rule 34, that even exists.
Malcolm: There is porn of it. God
Simone: bless America,
Malcolm: God bless the internet. You little herbs. Anyway, so the second most common fandom the material was coming from [00:02:00] was Little Pony, which is interesting and it's actually something we talk about in our book because if you think about it, humans are degenerates, of course, especially males.
Malcolm: So you would expect it would be some fandom with like scantily clad women. Actually the, the fandom that that beat it was Pokemon, but,
Simone: No.
Malcolm: Okay. Well, I don't, I don't want to get into that, but yeah, you expect that it's gonna be top by a bunch of these fandoms because there are a lot of fandoms out there.
Malcolm: That have a lot of scantily clad women in them. Yeah. So why, why aren't those the fandoms that are dominating these spaces? Well, I'd love to hear, do you have a theory or,
Simone: I, I mean both, both of these top, top rankers are kids shows, so I feel like there's something that has to do maybe with, I. I don't know. It can't be nostalgia though, because the adult audience that got into My Little Pony was not into My Little Pony as a kid. It was the new reboot of [00:03:00] My Little Pony that they only consumed as
Malcolm: adults.
Malcolm: Exactly. So I think it's a couple things that are happening here. So I think the core is, is we need to understand what sexuality, like what are our arousal patterns today We think of them as being these like, Despicable disgusting things because so many of our cultural traditions have evolved around repressing them and, and for good reason.
Malcolm: They lowered fertility rates if you just indulge in them whenever you have them. So a lot of cultures the cultures that were like just indulge in your sexuality whenever you feel it, they did not have as many surviving offspring and they were out-competed. But the cultural groups that recommended a high level of self-control.
Malcolm: However, however what did all of these systems evolve for in the first place? And it was to. Breed with high quality partners who would also dedicate resources to the offspring so that those offspring couldn't make it to adulthood.
Simone: Right? So far so good. Yeah, this seems reasonable.
Malcolm: So, so good. So it would be almost crazy if our arousal systems [00:04:00] were not paired in a way where we find people who our brains subconsciously recognize.
Malcolm: As good life, partners and members of our social group who we think about a lot, who we mentally engage with a lot as more arousing than ones we don't. You particularly ones that we feel uniquely safe around, particularly ones that model our society's ideals around womanhood as it relates to long-term partnership.
Malcolm: And that's what I really think you are seeing here is the very system that evolved to motivate the most wholesome of emotions, be more likely to become aroused by people who you see as wholesome and your friends, right? So
Simone: the, the first impression that the internet gets is, oh my God, you sick, disgusting monsters.
Simone: How are you turned on? [00:05:00] By cartoon ponies, and what you're saying is actually the people turned on by these cartoon ponies are actually very good. Like they're, they're triggered by instincts. Driven by being a very good, committed partner who wants to, well, I'm
Malcolm: not saying it's a good thing to, to be out there consuming this sort of material or creating this material, but what I'm saying
Simone: is, but you're saying it comes from a good place, you're saying?
Malcolm: No, I'm not saying it comes from a good place. Okay. What I'm saying is the evolutionary pressures. That motivated this behavior were actually, I mean it's, it's obviously, so suppose you're coding software, right? Okay. And you're like, well I want people to form like good relationships, so let's code the software to be like, yeah, be more likely to form a relationship with something you see as wholesome.
Malcolm: Something you spend a lot of time around. And if you think like specifically the My Little Pony show, you look at these characters cuz we used to be brownies, we [00:06:00] engaged in like, Is said, like my little pony memes in my proposal to you, when I did that Reddit proposal that, that with viral. Yes. I've had some of our listeners don't even know they were those, those people who, who did those, those types of people.
Malcolm: But anyway the, if you think about the characters in the show, they each represent a different stereotype of ideal long-term female partners. Hmm. With, with all of the aspects of that exaggerated and very few of the downsides. So if you're talking about a cultural archetype that people would glom onto.
Malcolm: Yes. And then two, because a large community formed around the show, a lot of people saw them as almost like high status individuals within the community. Like that would be the closest thing their evolutionary brain would have to. What a star of a show is. Well now
Simone: hold on, hold on. What you're saying here, actually, I feel like this doubly recommends, this community to women. Okay. So let's say that I'm a woman [00:07:00] who's dating and I discover that the guy I'm dating is aroused by, what do they call it? Lop arousing material related to my Little pony. Or they, they watch it for the plot or something, something like that, right?
Simone: But I find my boyfriends into it, or the guy I'm dating. What you're saying is he, one is aroused by people with whom he has, or characters figures with whom he has a close emotional relationship. And two, he's aroused by characters and people who show diligence. Pro-social behavior. It's, I, I think most women.
Simone: Would, would think, oh, this must be a freak. I can't date him. Red flag. Whereas like, oh, I would see a bigger red flag would be a guy who's like super aroused by violence in porn, like gang bangs. Like
Malcolm: get to that in a future a podcast. Yeah. Well, okay, so two things here. What is, I'm sorry I don't consume my little pony porn.
Malcolm: I, [00:08:00] I'm, I'm, I'm a terror. This is,
Simone: this is probably one of your greatest downsides. Think about all that, that, that is recommended about these, these gentlemen here and true gentlemen is the
Malcolm: word really. Men of class and, and men,
Simone: no men of class and distinction. Checking with me and like the whole gradation of, of genres of this type of material.
Simone: I have to say, hats off to these guys.
Malcolm: One thing that I think that, that you're touching on here that I really wanna dive into more on a, a later podcast, but I think it's interesting is we didn't have this theory and we were doing our sexuality books, so I wasn't able to elucidate on it. But since then, we've gotten to be friends with Ayla and we've talked a lot about the way arousal patterns work.
Malcolm: And we've gotten a chance to look at some of her data that this come out. And we've gotten some new ideas. And one of the ideas we have is that male sexuality may actually be polymorphic. And by that what I mean is it expresses itself differently, in different environments. And I suspect that somewhere was in the male brain.
Malcolm: There may be [00:09:00] something that. Tries to determine if a potential partner is in the long-term partner category of their brain or is in the we are raiding a village time to make as many kids as possible before we, we leave right part of their brain. Because the optimization of arousal patterns for these two different types of potential breeding interactions is wildly different.
Malcolm: Mm. And it would almost seem to be useful for men to have both of these patterns stored within their brains for different scenarios. And in women, we actually argue in, in the book that women also have a polymorphic sexual behavior pattern. So in women the more partners they sleep with, the less oxytocin they release with new partners.
Malcolm: And that basically means that they are forced to fall in love less with a partner, like they have less. Instinctual. I love this person because they slept with
Simone: me and this, well, they're just less likely to get super attached person. They're not gonna see, receive the same level of, [00:10:00] of like addiction.
This can actually cause trouble for women on the dating market.
When, if they've slept with, , a number of people, they will start to say, well, I'm looking for a guy. Who made me feel the way, , X, previous partner I had made me feel. And it may be that their biology has just adapted. So no other partner will ever make them feel that way, which can lead to them. Discounting potentially really good romantic partners for longterm relationships.
Malcolm: But what that means is their biology is basically saying, okay, if I am in a monogamous tribe and I like, this is the optimization. It's actually a really brilliant sort of polymorphic behavior pattern. It's saying, well, if I'm in this tribe, right, and this is a monogamous tribe and it's a stable tribe, and I have one partner, then it is useful to form an illogical attachment to the first person you sleep with.
Malcolm: But if I, my tribe has been rated and I'm being passed around as like a sex slave, well then it's, it's useful to not form attachments to everyone I'm sleeping [00:11:00] with, right? So in women, you see, This one pattern of changing sexuality, but in men, you'd want those two sexualities to overlap on the same mind and what we were arguing from the data might be true.
Malcolm: That we haven't collected data specifically on this. There's just hints of it, is that a lot of men may actually have two overlapping sexualities. One that expresses with people they see as potential long-term partners. So this would express in, in terms of like shows that they really enjoy for a long time or something like that.
Malcolm: As well as so like rule 31st, Jeff. But as well as like their wives. Right. And then another firm of, of sexuality, which is like the type of sexuality that gives them arousal. When they're consuming porn or something like that.
Simone: Well, okay, hold on, hold on. Let me see if I, if I understand you correctly.
Simone: So we've more discussed in, in other places this polymorphism with female sexuality, which is basically, The fewer sexual partners a woman has, the more attached she gets. And if she has more sexual partners, that's a sign you [00:12:00] should get less attached. Okay. That's smart. It means you're in a society where maybe you need to be a little more flexible.
Simone: That's good. Okay. So, but for men, the thing is like men may also be in a position where sort of us, which. Can flip of like, Hey, like it's time for me to be aroused by committed relationships, because I'm in that kind of stable society. And then the other flip is sort of like, oh, hey, I should more what devalue women just be like, Willing to churn through them as what, what, what, what exactly are signs of the other form of like male polymorphism?
Simone: Like one, one is pair bonded husband kind of material. What is, what does the other one look like? Well, I, I'd
Malcolm: argue that it's probably like brutal sexuality, like, like much more hardcore you would think. It could be expressed in online porn as. Rape, stuff like that.
Simone: Well, what, what I'm trying to get at here, which, which I think is interesting is what we've seen with swipe based dating and the failure of, of relationship markets [00:13:00] is that probably the vast majority of men, the implication of your theory is the vast majority of men who are not really getting many sexual partners, if any sex at all, are gonna fall into this husband category, which, we'd, we'd say is fairly pro-social and, and good for a relationship, whereas like the smaller group of men.
Simone: That is able to access a very broad array of women and actually does have a pretty high sexual partner count, is going to be, per this theory flipped to a much more, at least from the perspective of female partner, toxic form of sexuality.
Malcolm: Well, not necessarily from the perspective of female partner, because if we live in a society where women also have lots of sexual partners, then they are going to be in slave state sexuality, which basically means they are going to be more turned on by being
Simone: By more violent scenarios.
Simone: By more violent, by more violent scenarios. Yeah. Which, which shows up in our data. Right. Then the percentage of women, what was it like around 40% who reported actually being aroused by these violent, coercive scenarios? Yeah. Had more sexual partners. Yeah. Yeah. .
Malcolm: So what we saw in the data that really [00:14:00] tipped us off that this might be happening came from interviews of people who life like really extremist porn.
Malcolm: And th they often in their relationships were not actually interested in that with their partners. It was like their primary partners. Hmm. That was really interesting. Like why did you keep seeing that? So the point I was making is the type of porn a guy is consuming does not necessarily correlate with what they prefer in a relationship.
Malcolm: And I think that that is really interesting, but it can also cause problems. So if a guy's sleeping around a lot, like you have one of these Chad guys who's sleeping around a lot when they first engage with a woman, it means they're going to treat them much more in this brutal sexuality way.
Malcolm: But as they begin to form an attachment to them, they will treat them much more caringly like their brain will conceptualize them within the long-term partner form of sexuality. But then the problem you have there, Is that the woman may have found them attractive for this sort of brutal type of [00:15:00] sexuality.
Malcolm: Right? And I suspect in BDSM dungeons, this is why taking on roles is so important as well as the huge environmental change because you are trying to trick your brain into believing the person you are engaging with is not actually your long term partner, which is going to allow that different part of your sexual brain to activate.
Simone: That's interesting. Yeah. And of course that, that creates a problem if, in some communities that would be framed as losing frame, failing to maintain frame when what you're saying is it would, it's a natural course of events based on the way that that humans function.
Simone: So it's something to prepare for for sure. But that's That's interesting.
Malcolm: Yeah. Well, but I do really like your take it, it's such a fun idea of a take is like, oh, this, this, this type of material recommends a guy to a woman. Yeah. Wouldn't it be
Simone: fun if and I, I think this is something ALA's even [00:16:00] asked her Twitter followers about like, wouldn't it be really fun to sit down with someone you're dating and go through their erotic material history?
Simone: Which I think some people think about that and just like, Their faces go pale. Like they couldn't imagine sharing this with anyone. Like it's this shameful thing that they would never, ever wanna share with someone when I feel like you could actually learn so much about someone like looking through that search history and view history.
Malcolm: You could learn a bit about, and this is what's really interesting about arousing things. Hmm. You could learn a bit about the things that are pre-coded about them. Oh. But I think that's what's really important is they didn't choose those things. Mm-hmm. And what's important to remember with sexuality, whatever a person's sexuality is, I it, the, the, the things that arouse them is you have very little control over that.
Malcolm: And this is something that religious traditions admit as well. Like a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people are like, oh, they're trying to like erase gay people or something. It's like, no, they admit that some people are born same sex attracted, they just have a different cultural solution [00:17:00] for that.
Malcolm: Yeah. And whether or not it's a more effective cultural solution is it's probably not, like I admit, I, I would imagine if you're born same sex attracted, you probably have a much higher chance of committing suicide if you grow up in a, in a Christian household. But We also know from the data that if you're depressed, you have a much lower chance of committing suicide in Christian households.
Malcolm: So what does that mean? We give our depressed kids to the Christians and we give our same sex attracted kids to the progressives. Just do a, a child swap there for whoever likely to, I'm just, I'm just talking about the data, like if, if that's what we're going on there, but yeah, so there's, there's.
Malcolm: Different cultural solutions, but the point being, and I think that this is very important for people to remember, is the things that arouse you are not who you are. Mm-hmm. And so they, they are literally the least you part of you because they are like randomly coded things about you. They do not justify behavior.
Malcolm: But if somebody's just consuming content, right? Like that, that is, I don't know.
Malcolm: I, I don't know if, if I can pass judgment here, but [00:18:00] I do understand what you're saying, Simone.
Simone: I, you know me, I love seeing how people are weird. So I see it as a major, a major perk. Well that's, and I also want people like, this is a very controversial thing in that a bizarre number of, especially female partners think it counts as cheating.
Simone: Even if a male partner just looks at erotic material, which is. A
Malcolm: lot. That's, that's, yeah. I, I, I, I actually hate to say there was this famous study where they were going to try to find men. That didn't consume porn to compare with men that did consume porn, and they had to drop the study because they just couldn't find a large sample size of men that they consumed.
Malcolm: There was no porn. And I think that when you as a woman are sorting for guys who don't consume porn when they're in a relationship, what you're really sorting for is a guy who lies to you.
Simone: Because, or you're sorting for asexuality, which I do think we're gonna see going, oh yeah. You could be sorting for asexuality.
Simone: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, I think we're gonna see more and more asexuality [00:19:00] because it seems to be that there's a strong correlation between large amounts of endocrine disruptors and first trimester bloodstreams of mothers and less complete male sexual development for Right. Those
Malcolm: babies. So, well, and I love people would be like, yeah, but you can control, how, how often you consume erotic material, and I would say, well, the data doesn't really seem to suggest that.
Malcolm: If you look at areas like there's this great study that looks at areas by like the, the number of like religious people in them, and you actually get higher rates of porn consumption. When you are in a cultural group that is more against porn consumption, like the think act of trying to constrain it leads to it being more of a problem in your
Simone: daily life.
Simone: It's the same as as binge eating. You're more likely to see binge eating behavior among people with very strict diets. Well, well this is,
Malcolm: yeah, actually that's, that's correct. Mm-hmm. It actually comes to, in our book, we were like, well, could you actually go to like a camp to cure gayness? Cause you were talking about how like, Okay.
Malcolm: Sexuality can change, like if you use hormone therapy, like the 25% of, of, of people when they go [00:20:00] through trans hormone therapy, they change their gender of primary attraction. And we're like, well, okay, well, can you use this information can for anything? Like, no, because it's, it's random and, and these people aren't gonna wanna go through hormone therapy, so what could you do?
Malcolm: And we were like, oh, well, I guess you could go to a camp where you just have like tons of gay sex because you can actually desensitize yourself. That is true. Yeah.
The downside to this sort of a camp, of course, would be that you would have to do it regularly. Like it would have to be a once a year or twice a year thing.
Malcolm: And then we started thinking, we're like, oh, these all male secret societies in the woods for like, The conservative elite? Is that something that exists?
Malcolm: Oh, it is a thing that exists. Oh, is that like a camp that's meant to make them less gay? We do know. Hold on. I actually will say I, I can't talk to any of my own, but there's a famous quote from Nixon about the Bohemian Grove where he said it was the gayest thing he's ever seen.
Simone: I think he used a word meaner [00:21:00] than gayest, but yeah.
Malcolm: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But
Simone: we're being polite. But I love it. Yeah, there
Malcolm: all types of else other, oh, I, I really do wanna do a longer video on vore at some point, because I find that to be one of the most interesting weird arousal things. So this video is made in, in, in response to either being like, yeah, talk more about sexuality and our sexuality videos get the most clicks.
Malcolm: Because that, that one is confusing to me. Until we do a video, I, I would, I would venture to say, I. Suspect the answer might be boring. It might just be a misfiring of the dominance and submission system. Yeah. Potentially that system was borrowed at some point. One of the things we always say about evolution is evolution's a cheap programmer, and it might have been borrowed at some point of our system used for hunting.
Malcolm: Or maybe the hunting system was like trying to be hijacked by the, the system used to like, Hunt someone down and rape them when you're like raiding a village and, and that system beca, I don't know. I, [00:22:00] I, I suspect
Simone: it's something like that. Well, when you, when you look at like VRE illustrations though, you can see that it's a, a confluence of so many things, even like swaddling interest.
Simone: Like I, I think, eating I think extreme dominance, its Submiss mission totally show up there too. But then there's a lot of like furry content in there. So I just, I think what's really interesting to me is how cross-sectional it is, because it's very niche.
Malcolm: Oh, we've gotta do a video on furries sometime.
Malcolm: I, I love that. Our, our theory is always actually um, coverage, an ancient practice. Well, you look cross-culturally, almost all cultures have some sort of furry like practice where people in animal costumes dance around a fire to music.
Simone: It's traditional culture.
Malcolm: Yeah. Well, what I'm saying is I actually think it might be in.
Malcolm: A evolved group bonding ritual. You see this, in, in medieval Europe, if you look at what the masquerade balls were actually like, they were often done with like animal mass during that period. You look at ancient Egypt early Native American cultures, early Asian cultures I think in some [00:23:00] Polynesian cultures you see similar ceremonies, like why would every culture on earth have the animal mask, fire music ceremony?
Malcolm: Like that's weird. And then we see it in today's society, it's because they're men of true culture. But we'll go full into furries at some point cuz I, I think that's really interesting. Yes. Course of course. Course we're trying to bio-engineer a cat girl army that is the faction of elite that we are want to be aligned with is the, is the cat girl army.
Malcolm: To, to replace you. That's the type of conservatives that we are,
Simone: cat Girl, because that faction is the winning faction.
Malcolm: It's the winning faction to think that the master race already exists. The master race
Simone: is, is the cat girl. It lacks, it lacks the cute ears in Entail and, and soon today approach to relationships.
Simone: I, I don't, I don't think we're anywhere close to the pinnacle until that comes. Well,
Malcolm: love those conversations. Weirdo Simon, I love how you combine this weirdness. It was just such an openness to groups that are very [00:24:00] different from you and, and eagerness to understand them. I, I really appreciate that. It's, it's, it's, so, it's the thrilling to have that in, in my day-to-day life, and it really helps simmer portions of myself that may.
Malcolm: Be overly judgmental or, or look through groups that are different from me. Yeah.
Simone: But you're still way better at diving down through new rabbit holes and finding the things that I love, which I'm just, I love that. I love waking up each morning and having you surprise me with some new discovery, so never stop that.
Simone: Anyway, I love these conversations. Let's have another one soon. Okay. I love you too.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe