The survey helpfully began with a single left-right self placement item which I used to orient the graph horizontally. I then rotated it so that Libertarianism pointed cleanly into its own dimension, which left Tough-Mindedness remaining as the vertical axis. The result is easily recognizable as the same map that I’ve written about extensively in previous posts; although “Progressive” is the new tough-minded leftist now that communists have wandered a bit towards the center, fascists are right where Eysenck found them in the 1940s.

The first bit of news to me is exactly what “populist” means. Ever since Trump appeared on the scene I’ve been saying “sure, fine, but what is populism?” without getting an answer. Scholars describe populism as a “contested concept”1 whose “definitional precariousness is proverbial.”2 It seems to revolve around opposition to some illegitimate elite who are themselves circumventing democracy and the will of the people.3

Psychological studies do not paint a particularly coherent picture of the typical populist. One study found that “belief in conspiracies with greedy… elites are associated with populism,”4 and another article reports that across the Netherlands, Germany, and the US, low Big Five Agreeableness is a correlate of Populist attitudes.5 My favorite study was from 2021, looking at populists in Turkey and Italy using a variety of measures; these found few consistent traits of populists across the different contexts beyond an endorsement of conspiracy beliefs and a lack of trust in national institutions.

But while these are somewhat interesting, they still don’t give me a very good idea of what populism is in a way that this survey does—nor do they necessarily capture the essence of populism, because they begin with various definitions of what populism ought to be, and then try to measure that. But words have no intrinsic meaning; the meaning of a word like “populism” is really nothing more than what people use it to mean. In other words, the most legitimate way of determining what populism is, it to find people who self-identify as populists and ask them what they believe. Pull the data together in a survey, turn the crank on a nice principal components analysis, and it comes out that, basically:

Curiously—for a political group that is supposed to be characterized by anti-elitism—populism is remarkably similar to monarchism. This is rather a surprise; it seems to stem from the specific left-right position of populism, and this may be a quirk of our particular sample. A survey in some other language such as Spanish could find populists lean to the left, since left-leaning populism is often considered more typical in Latin America.

So, I spent some time considering whether there might not be some way to test this idea that there are two “populisms.” Populists are often regarded as extremists, rather than merely moderately to the right; if this sample consisted mostly of American-style, conservative populists, with some hard left populists mixed in, this would result in an overall blending in this particular sample that resulted in what looks like a subtly right-leaning populism. This leads to a cleanly testable hypothesis: If there were a left-leaning populism and a right-leaning populism, with few centrist populists, then populists should show greater variability in their conservatism scores than non-populists.

This dataset contained 191 self-identified populists and 3030 non-populists. An F-test on their conservatism scores found their variances differ at p = 1.1x10^-9! Normally we would expect that a self-identified political subgroup would be more homogeneous than the entire survey group, not more varied as we find here with populists.6 In other words, there does indeed seem to be a schism amidst the populists, and this dataset reveals conservatism is not a specific feature of populism.

By contrast, the tough-minded, authoritarian character of populism seems to be a much stronger signal. If so, does this mean that tender-minded libertarians are the sorts of people who are OK with established elites? Like everything else in science, we really need a replication before drawing firm conclusions, but to me, this is a satisfying result, and finally gives me a way I can clearly understand populism: From now on, whenever someone says “populist,” I’m going to decode this as “tough authoritarian, possibly with a unique flavor of manichaean anti-elitism.”

Isn’t Everybody an Authoritarian?

What I find interesting is that so many of the self-identified clusters are decidedly paternalistic or unlibertarian. This is true whether we’re talking about populists, socialists, monarchists, or Christian conservatives. Only rationalists and libertarians have a strong anti-authoritarian leaning, and maybe the reason everyone else is so visibly political is because they tacitly agree that personal freedom isn’t a big deal. Once you agree that authorities, rules, and regulations get to control everything, I suppose it makes sense for you to be seriously invested in what those authorities, rules, and regulations are!

Also worth noting are the way the labels in this survey “work.” Many people are skeptical about psychological methods—what if we ask the questions in a different way, or in a different context; do they mean the same thing? Survey respondents simply ticked a box to indicate whether a specific label like “Populist” or “Christian Conservative” applied to them, while they rated detailed questions using a 5-point Likert scale. But despite the stark difference in framing, the personal labels clustered in very predictable ways with the value statements:

• Left Wing is right next door from “We should have a lot of restrictions on the purchase of guns” and “Many police officers in the U.S. are racist against Black people,”

• Traditional Conservative and Christian Conservative are both adjacent to “Abortion is morally wrong,”

• Libertarian dovetails with “Capitalism tends to be a force for good in the world,” and

• Effective Altruist dovetails with the belief that “In most situations, making things way better is absolutely possible.”

But How Trustworthy Are These Findings?

Skeptics and non-psychologists are always concerned about things like whether a study used a convenience sample, or whether the survey questions were biased. I’m not saying that bias and sample problems don’t exist, and I want to be very clear that, like most of my work, this survey used a convenience sample; in this case I don’t even have any idea about what was motivating the choice of questions to ask. But these results are further confirmation that what matters most is A) the sample size, B) the breadth of the questions asked, and C) how adroitly the analysis is carried out.

In a principal component analysis (PCA) like this, we’re looking at the pattern of correlations rather than averages, so even a weird sample (like, say, the readers of Astral Codex Ten) still has enough variation for the relationships to come through clearly with broad enough questions. And because I knew to rotate the first three dimensions in this same way as previous studies, the map came through very cleanly; another researcher might have just called the first unrotated factor “conservatism” and then struggled to identify the other dimensions which would be upside-down and intermingled.

Whether the exact character of populism (and other self-descriptors) will remain fixed across other studies remains to be seen. However, the position of other ideologies has moved only modestly across samples and centuries, so I’m predicting that the findings regarding populism, anarchism, and other novel political descriptors will remain similarly robust across future studies.

Surprises and Other Points of Note

All that being said, there were a few minor differences between the findings from this dataset and other studies I’ve carried out:

• Pro-Life Values. Across all surveys pro-life attitudes are tender and conservative, but this dataset found them to be authoritarian as well. This is the default assumption, though it didn’t hold across my previous surveys. I think the most likely reason for this difference is just that now, the sample size is much larger, given that these findings match most people’s expectations.

• Monarchists. In past studies carried out in Britain, support for royalty is slightly tender-minded. Why were the self-identified monarchists in this sample tough-minded? I’m really not sure, and this seems rather surprising. My guess is that monarchists in this modern and mostly American sample were probably more influenced by Mencius Moldbug and Trump’s king memes than by Charles III (who by all accounts is a bit of a dud as kings go), but honestly I’m not sure about this.

• Human Extinction. Very interesting to find the tough-left quadrant is where people claim “Humanity has a significant chance of going extinct in the next 100 years.” Considering also the tough-leftist endorsement of “Automation and technology is going to rapidly take away many people’s jobs,” it seems that this quadrant is not straightforwardly pro-science. But this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, considering that this is where Apple Pie lives, and I’ve written about human extinction in the past. Rather, it seems that tough-minded leftists are most interested in speculating on both positive and negative consequences of technology, probably because for them science and technology has more immediacy, more emotional salience than it does for their opponents in the tender conservative quadrant, who are still arguing why the Rapture didn’t happen in 2025 as was predicted on TikTok (or, for the Gen X Christian Conservatives, why all 88 reasons for why the Rapture would happen in 1988 turned out to be wrong).

• Censorship. As usual, the woke left (tender-authoritarian leftists) endorse the idea of censoring people without justification; to clarify, the green NoFreeSpeech dot at the lower left stands for “Someone who has been accused of racism or sexism should not be allowed to speak on college campuses.” Keen as I am not to miss an opportunity to make fun of the woke brigade, I will hereby accuse everyone who endorses the above statement of both racism and sexism, and let them sort out whether they should staple their mouths shut before setting foot on university grounds.

Two More Factors

On a more serious note, what’s really wonderful about large samples like these is that the covariance matrix is very precise. Psychometric surveys are noisy instruments, and typically every time you extract one factor under PCA, you’re taking some signal away, leaving a residuum that gets noisier and noisier until it’s very difficult to be confident that what you’re looking at still has signal. But with over 3000 respondents, there was easily enough statistical power to pull out more than just three factors from this dataset.

The downside is that the question set wasn’t as broad as I would have liked. Don’t get me wrong, it was quite broad—but there was nothing about euthanasia, recreational drugs, capital punishment, digital privacy, universal basic income, vegetarianism, vaccination, or the military, let alone the kinds of questions that would really push boundaries on what is out there in terms of attitudes towards topics like unschooling, cryogenics, psychic powers, eugenics, cell phone addiction, the Singularity, historical revisionism, psilocybin therapy, Friedrich Nietzsche, or UFOs. The results of my previous research suggests those questions would have revealed some interesting factors related to how willing people are to go out on a limb about strange ideas.

But there were many questions on oddball political orientations, and on one’s general belief in the goodness of the world we live in. All of these formed interpretable fourth and fifth factors, plotted below. (I’ve kept the colors representing libertarianism the same as above in an attempt to make it easier to read each graph.)

The highest loading items in the vertical dimension help us identify this as a dimension of overall optimism, trust in the world, and subjective well-being. Meanwhile, the horizontal dimension is pretty obviously pitting oddball and extremist political groups like anarchists and communists against centrists who don’t like such a diverse and divided political landscape.

Populists show up at the dissatisfied, extreme lower left corner of the graph; they are somewhat pessimistic about the world and rather outside of the mainstream. Anarchists and communists show up far on the fringe, along with people like me who dearly wish America would seriously stop interfering in other countries, because I think it has a marked tendency to foist its growing craziness on the rest of the world. Say what you will about North Korea, but Kim Jong Il has had virtually no impact on life outside of East Asia; people across the entire world are left shaking their heads and wondering how America is going to affect their lives next week.

The vertical dimension is more interesting. Often factors require a great deal of interpretation or argumentation to make sense, but this dimension is extremely obvious. Optimistic attitudes relating to an overall trust in the world and satisfaction with life are found at the top; negative attitudes are found at the bottom.

But why does the dimension exist? Why do some people believe “The world is a place where working hard and being nice pays off” while others think “Life in this world is usually pain and suffering?” The most typical interpretation found in academia is that the status quo is unjust, but some people are benefitting from the situation as it is, and will take pains to defend what they therefore regard as a just world. Meanwhile, those who are exploited, or exposed to the problems inherent in the system, are marginalized and ignored by those who harbor just world beliefs.

But the usual line also has it that conservatives believe in the myth of a just world, when out of all the self-identified political labels, it’s “traditional liberal” that shows the most overall optimism and trust in institutions. The explanation for this result very likely arises from the time the survey was carried out—do you remember the summer of 2021? That was when Biden had been elected president, but psychologists were still publishing articles like “Understanding gender differences in rape victim blaming: The power of social influence and just world beliefs”7 as an unsubtle means of pathologizing conservative men.

And frankly, I have little patience for the kind of people who push this line; they were totally blindsided by Trump’s first election because they were totally unconcerned about what life was like for Trump’s voter base: uneducated white men on the right who have been dying in droves of what sociologists call deaths of despair—alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide.

Of some interest is the fact that this phenomenon could never be explained by institutional racism. But it could be explained by persistent attempts to blame all of America’s problems on institutional racism; for some time, educated whites managed to deflect charges of racism onto their less educated peers, with results that should be familiar by now: Where ‘despair deaths’ were higher, voters chose Trump.

So while there may be something to the idea that the self-satisfied belief in a just world is what drives people to be optimistic about the status quo, it also looks like the status quo beliefs are more aligned with normie idea on the right side of the graph, against fringe beliefs on the left side of the graph.

Instead, I do have a useful alternative way of interpreting the vertical dimension: some people are jittery, paranoid, not very intelligent, in poor health, out of luck, or otherwise not doing very well in the world because there is something wrong with them. If life dealt you a losing hand, and you think things are getting worse, you are going to be understandably leery of capitalism. If you aren’t competitive on the job market, you’ll have a reason to think IQ tests might be rigged. If your health is failing, you may very well be concerned about pesticides in food, or issues with the US health care system. If you’ve ever spent much time riding the bus or visiting homeless shelters, you’ll have ample opportunity to engage with people who think everything is rigged, politicians are all liars, and life is unfair.

Unfortunately we have no way of testing this idea using the dataset at our disposal because there were no questions asking respondents about their personalities, their social status, or even their age or gender. Nevertheless, I’m very grateful to the anonymous researcher who shared their data with me.

Conclusion

This dataset of 3220 people from the 2021 Astral Codex Ten survey replicated the three dimensions of political values already known as:

1. Conservatism vs Leftism,

2. Tough-Mindedness vs Tender-Mindedness, and

3. Libertarianism vs Paternalism,

while extending the analysis to two novel dimensions that look like:

4. Mainstream vs Fringe political affiliation, and

5. Optimism vs Pessimism.

Self-identified populists were found to be tough-minded and paternalistic, as well as somewhat fringe and pessimistic, but were more heterogeneous in terms of left-right beliefs than non-populists. A replication will be necessary before considering these findings definitive.

Why don’t they ever have ads for anything good? This is what I want to know! They seldom advertize anything I want, and even when they do, it’s never anything good for me. Thinking about it, however, we probably have to admit that if it’s something good, then usually we already know we want it.

Usually—but not always.

As a case in point, you probably didn’t know that looking at rocks was something you really urgently should get out and do. So consider this post a free, limited-time offer to go look at some rocks. This is an opportunity to try it with your family and friends, and it’s an experience you won’t soon forget. No telescopes required, no cell reception needed, just the naked eyes and maybe the glasses you’re already wearing. Granted, I can’t promise the weather will be clear, or that there won’t be trees, mountains, or giant billboards with cruddy ads in the way, but, I can tell you that when the sun sets this solstice, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus will all be in conjunction along the ecliptic beneath a lovely moon.

Happy Solstice Everyone! Act now before this offer disappears.

Thanks for reading Things to Read.

Religion arose whenever the following happened:

1. An ancestral human happened to be more afraid of, or more impressed by, a phenomenon than what would be useful to them on an individual level.

2. The said ancestral human managed to convince other humans that their perception was relevant and correct.

3. The group of delusional individuals gained advantages at the expense of other groups.

This process might have started at several places independently of each other. It led to the multiplication of genes for unusual patterns of sense of mind.

It isn’t hard to see that her idea is, essentially:

Schizotypy was a useful trait in prehistory, because people prone to psychotic episodes were able to unify their group by convincing other group members to believe in supernatural beings.

I don’t think this is quite right

In this post, I want to clarify

• What exactly I think is wrong with the above, and

• Offer a complementary model explaining why people believe in God.

What’s wrong is easy: Schizotypy is essentially a person’s liability for schizophrenia.1 I don’t think schizotypy was or is ever a good trait to have, ever, under any circumstances.

There is a common feeling among many thinkers that evolution is amazing, or even miraculous. When I contemplate the delicate balance of systems in the human body, or complex modes of symbiosis such as the mycorrhizal network, I share this experience of awe for the accomplishments of blind, unthinking Nature. Evolution is amazing.

But evolution doesn’t have a plan, and it doesn’t do things on purpose. It’s like the biological analogue of the free market, which delivers gaming consoles like Playstations to 40% of American adults, and also makes 70% of the same Americans fat. If some trait exists in some species, very often it’s just because evolution is completely mindless, and pushes for things that benefit no one.

Don’t believe me? OK, here’s just one example: stupidity.

Is Stupidity Adaptive?

A broad, deep, and rich literature has developed over the course of the 20th century to investigate the consequences of this trait, which include:

• Alcoholism,23

• Criminality,45

• Driving accidents,6

• Illegitimacy (i.e. giving birth out of wedlock),7

• Mental Illness,8

• Obesity,9

• Poverty,1011

• Religiosity and religious fundamentalism1213

• Unemployment1415

Although occasionally malnutrition or trauma play a role (i.e. iodine deficiency,16 head injury17) the major culprit, at least within groups, is well known to be genetic: Stupid is as stupid genes.18

This creates an evolutionary puzzle. Why does stupidity exist when it is related to so many manifestly negative outcomes? Could there be a hidden evolutionary advantage to stupidity?

In fact, it’s well known that there is an advantage: stupidity enhances a person’s reproductive prospects, at least in the modern day. Very simply put, ever since demographers have been counting—which is, in fact, since even before IQ was formalized as a concept—having more stupidity translates to having more children.19202122232425

I’ve cited seven sources for this; I could have cited twenty. The worldwide dysgenic trend is one of the best studied sociological phenomena we could name. But what should we conclude from this? Well, we could conclude that some random correlate of stupidity, like religion, is an important part of Mother Nature’s Plan. We could talk about how stupidity is actually an unappreciated trait. We could tell a story about how religion is good because it encourages individual generosity and group cohesion, so if stupidity makes people more religious, then stupidity is good, or at least, not all bad!

Alternatively, we could recognize immediately that Mother Nature doesn’t know what She’s doing. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t listen. She doesn’t have a plan.26 To the extent that She can be seen as trying to do anything, She’s trying to make the entire world dumber. Her efforts are successful: IQ is dropping across the developed world.2728

Granted, this wasn’t obvious until recently. For a good long while, the Flynn Effect was raising our test scores, even if not the actual underlying intelligence measured by IQ. We were able to go along for decades without seeing the drop, as education, nutrition, pediatric care, media proliferation, the rise of personal computers in homes and schools, and any other possible and putative cause for the Flynn Effect continued to advance with civilization.29 But no longer: “For the first time in nearly a century, IQ scores are trending down.” The environmental IQ gains ran out, and well, here we are.

This is one reason why, years ago, when all the atheists were insisting, “No, look, religion is just going to die,” I kept saying “I don’t believe you, not unless stupid believers somehow stop having kids.” Because even back then we knew the relationship between stupidity and religion was pretty robust, and the evidence has continued to accumulate. I only cited two (older) studies above, so let’s look at the most modern, large-scale study I can find: A 2022 meta analysis of data from over 201,457 people. Here are all the study results from 1928 to 2018:

The overall effect size between IQ and religiosity was a modest but consistent r = -0.14, with no change across time.

One of my old (Orthodox Christian) friends was aware of this relationship, but assumed it was a result of education. If smarter people go to college, and the educational system is hostile to religion, small wonder smarter people end up irreligious. I want to stress that I really think this kind of thinking is excellent as a hypothesis. Unfortunately a hypothesis is incomplete until tested, and this meta analysis was able to check the mediating effect of education on religiosity.

So what do you think? Is it really stupidity that makes people conventionally religious? Or, is it merely education that, in this current day and age, trains smarter people to think irreligiously? Well, here are the findings of the meta analysis:

[I]t has been hypothesized, that between-individual differences in education rather than intelligence are most likely the drivers of the intelligence and religiosity link… We found that education does not mediate the intelligence and religiosity link… Interestingly though, we observed a full mediation of intelligence on the education and religiosity association

So no, education doesn’t seem to be responsible for this. More interestingly, the study was able to find that another variable—cognitive style—did mediate the relationship:

According to the dual-process model of the mind… there are two different systems of information processing. One outputs intuitive judgments, because it is responsible for automatic information processing. The other one is responsible for systematic, analytic information processing… From this perspective, it could be argued that individuals that use a more intuitive (and therefore experiential) and a less analytic (and therefore rational) information processing style may be more accessible to religious ideals. This interpretation is supported by the observations that individuals that reported stronger beliefs in God showed lower analytical processing styles [68], whilst more intelligent people were found to prefer analytical over intuitive processing [69]. Our results in terms of mediating influences of cognitive style on the religiosity and intelligence association are consistent with this idea.

So it really doesn’t look like smart people are irreligious because they’re trained not to believe from college. While we don’t know what exactly was going on in the paleolithic, this pathway is robust enough that it seems likely to be enduring. Stupidity is not an advantageous trait, no matter whether it is favored by differential fertility. To say that evolution enhances human stupidity in order to promote religiosity would be absurd, and so far as I’m aware, everybody can see this right away, so no one even proposes the idea.

The situation with Belief and Madness is the Same

The idea that stupidity may be a good trait, or have upsides, because of its ability to promote religion is exactly the same as the idea that madness may be a good trait, or have upsides, because of its ability to promote religion.

And yes, madness really does help to prompt religious thinking, just as Tove says:

Religion is unlikely to have started by psychologically normal people meditating and finding out that if they really think about it, the world must be magical. Religion is much more likely to have started with the psychologically unusual people who forcibly think in magical terms. What is the probability that psychologically average people made the abstract conclusion that the world is magical, when they were accompanied by people who knew that the world is magical, without even thinking?

This idea is well supported empirically. Although there’s only a weak positive relationship between schizotypy and religiosity, the relationship is there, increasing the odds of both habitual prayer and religious experience.303132 Most relevant to the question of how religion forms, modern day adherents to novel religious movements (read: cultists) have elevated rates of schizotypy compared to mainstream Christians, and particularly compared to non-religious individuals.33

And this is, incidentally, a finding that bolsters the skeptical argument against God. Yes, believers may point to a variety of miraculous events in written history supporting the miracles of Moses or the visions of the prophet Zoroaster, and OK, sure, maybe those guys were totally sane. But when we look at people who have spiritual experiences today, well, let’s just say they’re drawn disproportionately from the nuttier echelons of society. If people talking about miracles and the power of prayer right now aren’t very reliable because they tend disproportionately to be unhinged, doesn’t it make sense to think that the people writing the Bible, the Quran, or the ancient Sumerian Kesh Temple Hymn weren’t very reliable because they tended disproportionately to be unhinged?

It’s interesting to take an alternative perspective, and imagine that the insane are closer to the spirit world by virtue of the fact that their reason has quieted, allowing supernatural influences to come through clearly. Of course, this doesn’t do very much to support a traditional Abrahamic approach to religion—if God is omnipotent, then He should be able to speak to anyone at any time. But it does open up the kind of interesting possibility that annoys atheists: What if there are supernatural entities that aren’t omnipotent, omnibenevolent, or anything like that?

I admit that it would be nice to rule out the possibility of divine madness giving a person some insight into the stranger corners of reality. Unfortunately, most skeptical arguments against the monotheistic creator gods the typical believers love so well have much more trouble dealing with the kinds of transcendental beings beloved of eccentrics, cultists, and esotericists. For instance, the Problem of Evil makes it difficult to believe in a God that is all powerful and all good, because one naturally wonders why a being that was all powerful and all good would create sinful humans in a world of suffering and iniquity. But fringe entities like Ashtar Sheran aren’t vanquished by the Problem of Evil; he’s just some rando ET, not a creator God who can be blamed for everything34.

But whether or not we’re interested in exploring the philosophical possibility for the existence of these beings, the fact of the matter is that people who believe in them tend to have elevated rates of schizotypy. The studies above looked at religious experience and participation in novel religious movements, but the relationship between schizotypy and religion is quite general—the evidence provided by multiple studies shows that religiosity is associated with schizotypy.353637

What the evidence doesn’t show is any upsides for the world of schizotypy.

Bad Things Aren’t Always Bad

Long-time readers of Things to Read will know I’m quite happy to defend traits and behaviors usually regarded as bad, saying things like:

• Research says drinking is better for you than total abstinence from alcohol.

• Bad people have a political perspective that should be considered, or

• The evidence shows schizotypy doesn’t reduce creativity

This last conclusion comes from a line of research into Disintegration, which is the name of a basic personality trait underlying psychosis-proneness. And the argument that Disintegration / schizotypy is helpful for creativity takes this form:

1. Schizotypy is terrible. It’s really bad. It prevents your brain from functioning properly, and at the extreme end, manifests as catastrophic mental illness such as schizophrenia.

2. Despite this, schizotypy does not show a negative linear relationship with creativity.

3. In order for there to be no negative linear relationship between schizotypy and creativity, average amounts of disintegration may provide a creative boost over very low levels.

Is above-average schizotypy, or Disintegration, beneficial? Well, if your intuition says “probably not,” then your very obvious intuition is well supported scientifically, because just like stupidity, a person’s psychotic liability is associated with just about every negative outcome one could imagine. For starters, here’s the linear relationship Disintegration shows with problem alcohol and drug use, and with quality of life, in a sample of n = 300:

The adaptionist might object, “Fine, whatever, they’re all drunk, high, and also miserable until their schizotypy prompts them to invent religion, which improves social cohesion in the paleolithic world,” except that this social cohesion is then seriously compromised by their schized-out difficulty with relationships, found in the same paper on a sample of n = 537:

Note this is a finding for close relationships in general, not merely partnered relationships, meaning good luck forging a poignant Männerbund with all of your other crazy prehistoric buddies.

It’s worth noting that, while psychologists often give names for things that don’t necessarily capture what’s being discussed, Disintegration is described precisely as the kind of apophenic cognition that would lend itself to magical thinking and schizotypy, as from the outset, it was understood that:

• “Disintegration reflects individual differences in the tendency to see, cognize, and feel connections among factually unrelated events or false-positive detection errors…”38 while,

• “The main advantage of the Disintegration construct, supported by empirical evidence on the broadness of the domain, is that it subsumes the most important models of schizotypy proposed up to date.”39

But OK, what about older studies that simply measured schizotypy as “schizotypy?” We can use these as a check on the above findings, and unsurprisingly, the same results appear. Schizotypy is related to lower subjective well-being, particularly the domains of relationships (r = -0.41, p < 0.01) and community feeling (r = -0.49, p < 0.01), though not really with satisfaction with religion (r = -0.18, p > 0.05).40 Schizotypy is related to avoidant and anxious attachment,4142 weakening social relationships. One Scandinavian study looked at the economic burden of Schizotypy:

Total costs amounted €47,215 per year for patients with schizotypal disorder, which was fifteen times higher than the matched controls. Of these, 41% were healthcare and home care costs and 59% were costs of lost productivity. Healthcare costs and costs of lost productivity were increased during five years before initial diagnosis of schizotypal disorder. Total costs of spouses to patients were €21,384 compared with €2519 among spouses of controls. 75% of the total costs of spouses to patients were related to lost productivity.

So merely being espoused to someone diagnosed as schizotypal entails the loss of thousands of Euros every year simply due to your own lost productivity.

Maybe this wasn’t the case in the paleolithic. Maybe back in the good old days, you could spend hours holding your crazy spouse’s hand without any issues. You could let them tell you all about the weird voices they heard, and suspicious ways the birds were looking at them, and it wouldn’t have any impact on your hunting efficiency, your social coalitions, your ability to gather water, or your ability to schmooze with the tribal chief.

And, well, it really may be that this was once the case. But in just the same way that the association between schizotypy and religious experience in a modern context calls into question the sanity of the authors of ancient religious texts, the association between schizotypy and a host of negative social outcomes in a modern context calls into question the functionality of primeval schizotypes. Sure, they were probably pretty good at inventing religious ideas. However, given the serious social problems that are known to attend schizotypy today, there’s no reason to believe that was a net positive for them, or for anyone they knew.

It may seem natural to ask, then, but why does schizotypy exist? Shouldn’t evolution have eradicated it, along with hard-core schizophrenia, long ago?

The trouble is that evolution works via random mutation and natural selection. Random mutation generates (primarily) dysfunctional traits, and natural selection cleans them out. The key to understanding how mental illness could persist despite natural selection is the fact that natural selection can only work on an allele when it “sees” it. Dominant alleles express themselves with only one copy, but recessive traits only appear in the presence of two copies. This is why deleterious traits, such as reduced IQ, are frequently coded by recessive alleles.43

What about traits like schizophrenia risk? To find out whether a trait is more strongly associated with recessive than dominant alleles, we can look at rates of schizophrenia in the descendants of consanguineous pairings, where their parents were more related than average. And it turns out, mental illness is more common when there is an opportunity for recessive alleles to form pairs.

• “[C]onsanguinity is an important risk factor for schizophrenia”44

• “consanguinity rates are significantly elevated among Egyptian SZ [schizophrenia] patients in the Nile delta region.”45

• “the inbreeding coefficient was higher in schizophrenic… patients compared to

  their counterparts.”46

Interestingly, there is also a signal from paternal age. Natural selection cannot operate on de novo mutations, and older fathers produce gametes with more mutations. So it shouldn’t be surprising that some proportion of schizophrenia and underlying schizotypy in the population can be attributed to advanced paternal age:

• “schizotypy and neuroticism correlated with paternal age in healthy subjects”47

• “Compared with other known risk factors for schizophrenia, advanced paternal age appears to be intermediate in magnitude.”48

To make a long story short: Evolution didn’t try to solve a puzzle by coming up with stupidity or schizotypy. Ultimately, the proliferation of these traits looks like yet another unfortunate side effect of evolution in an imperfect world.

So is Belief in God Just An Error?

Madness and stupidity are both personal problems. But the same can’t quite be said of religion.

To begin, religion is associated with subjective well-being.49 This finding appears to be driven by the most dedicated adherents: in a 2011 article, “Who benefits from religion,” the main finding was that, while lukewarm belief was associated with lowered well-being, people who truly and genuinely believe experience a small but significant boost to their well-being:50

There are reports of benefits to marital satisfaction from religiosity,5152 and even sexual satisfaction due to subjects’ belief in the sanctity of marriage.53 And living well isn’t all there is to it—religious people live longer, as large studies find religious involvement reduces the chance of death by all causes.5455

One of the best papers on the benefits of religion is probably Harold Konig’s 2012 article, “Religion, Spirituality, and Health,” where he carries out a number of literature reviews on the impact of religion on a variety of outcomes, finding religion or spirituality (R/S) is related to:56

• Well-Being or Happiness: 325 studies, of which 76% returned significant positive relationships with religion/spirituality.

• Meaning and Purpose: 45 studies. “42 (93%) reported significant positive relationships.”

• Avoiding Substance Abuse: 185 studies, where “84% reported inverse relationship with R/S…”

• Law Abidingness: 104 studies, with 79% returning significant inverse relationships with crime or delinquency.

• Marital Stability: 79 studies, of which “86% found R/S related to greater marital stability and no studies reported an association with greater marital instability.”

• Social Support: 74 studies, of which 61 (82%) found significant positive relationships with religion or spirituality.

• Coping with adversity (such as cancer, caregiver burden, acts of terrorism, and overall stress): 454 studies. “In the overwhelming majority of studies, people reported that R/S was helpful.”

The evidence for the positive effects of belief are strong enough to have compelled philosophers like Alain de Botton to promote Religion for Atheists, in an attempt to level the playing field.

Now I’m not religious in any conventional sense. But I see right away that religious people may well respond: “If you want the benefits, why not just believe?” And while I’m not an atheist, it isn’t hard to see the rejoinder there, either: “I’m neither stupid nor crazy enough to believe.”

Sitting somewhat outside the debate, I’m much more interested in trying to understand belief as a social or psychological phenomenon. To me it makes most sense to ask, if believing in God is largely (though by no means exclusively) associated with stupidity and craziness, then how can there be any upside to belief? Notice I’m asking about genuine belief, the kind that’s associated with actual well-being, not just hollow religious membership or extrinsic religiosity, which doesn’t help. What’s the upside to genuine belief?

Three possibilities come to mind:

1. Belief functions pretty much like a placebo. Religion makes us feel better.

2. God or some weird entity blesses believers, regardless of what exactly they believe in. (Right? Ashtar Sheran seems like a nice guy, he doesn’t care if you’re Buddhist or Muslim, it’s all good with Ashtar)

3. There’s some positive trait or traits that promote religious engagement, and the upsides to religion come from that.

Well, I’m not ruling out 1 or 2. But mind you, there is a mountain of evidence for point 3.

One of the big names in the study of personality and religion is Vassilis Saroglou. In his 2002 meta analysis, Religion and the Five Factors of Personality, he finds:

[I]n addition to Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, religiosity (today?) is related to Extraversion… The meta-analysis also indicated that extrinsic religiosity is followed by high Neuroticism, whereas open-mature religiosity and spirituality reflect Emotional Stability.57

These relationships are fairly modest, but the more modern HEXACO model adds information for Honesty-Humility. This is a pretty valuable trait which predicts healthy mental and social functioning independently of schizotypy, and if you’re looking for it, religious people have got it:

The relationship of religiousness with the HEXACO (Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness) model of personality was studied in Iran and the United States. Correlations of personality factors and religiousness were generally similar across the two societies. In both countries, religiousness was associated with higher scores on Honesty-Humility, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. The Honesty-Humility factor was one of the strongest correlates of religiousness in both countries. These findings support Saroglou's observation that the main personality characteristics of religiousness are consistent across different religious contexts and personality measures and models.58

The findings from these two samples have been replicated over five more samples across three countries (Poland, Iran, and Malaysia).59 Averaging the seven samples together, I find the overall correlation between religiosity and Honesty-Humility is r = 0.33, with Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness showing more modest correlations (0.17, 0.21, and 0.24, respectively).

So if we forget about appearances for a moment and concentrate on the soul,60 this is what the angels who fill out the pews, donate to church fundraisers, and say grace at Thanksgiving look like: A little nutty, yes, and not so bright either, but friendly, responsible, honest, and humble. And while it may be that religion works like a placebo, and while it may be that blessings fall upon the believers, long term readers will know I think that virtue is often its own reward.

Why Do People Believe in God?

So now we’re finally ready to answer the question posed at the title of this post. We have seen that people with both positive and negative traits are drawn to believe in supernatural powers. Putting these things together, I can come up with three main forces prompting belief:

1. Believers have poor reasoning abilities. They are not very intelligent, not very good at analytical reasoning, or prone to apophenia and magical thinking.

2. Believers are especially virtuous people. Living in a divinely ordered universe where right is rewarded is natural and intuitive for them.

3. All humans are extremely vulnerable in infancy and early childhood. We have evolved to love and submit to powerful others in order to survive this vulnerable period of life.

Points 1 and 2 are undergirded by a wealth of psychological studies reported in some depth above. I think it would be difficult to argue with point 1, and while we might definitely talk a bit about point 2, that was very much my lived experience when I was a Christian: having a God to point to makes arguments about good and evil much, much easier. I left because it didn’t make sense, not because I chafed against its restrictions—and I knew beforehand there would be a moral void left behind by the Bible.

But these points don’t, by themselves, seem to explain why people in general are so likely to believe in loving, powerful, helpful supernatural entities. Lots of people are bad at reasoning; wouldn’t they just see demons and dangers everywhere? Lots of people are ethically upright; wouldn’t they just make up new ways to do the right thing? And how do we explain smart, sane, jerks who still believed in God?61 Every society we know has had gods. It’s almost axiomatic to say that ”Religion is a cultural universal found in all social groups.” Personality research explains why some people in a society might or might not believe in gods, but it doesn’t explain why our entire species has been called Homo Religiosus. So why would that be?

Point 3 is my answer to this question. Point 3 says, “Look. Babies seem like they have well developed instincts to reach upward for a parent. The God-human relationship looks a lot like a parent-child relationship.”

Now, people who have never been part of an Abrahamic religion might suspect it’s more like a boss-employee relationship, or even an abstract kind of feeling about something out there, but this is definitely wrong—believers’ relationship to God is close and personal.

For example, the German language has two words for you: Sie, a formal way of speaking to a superior or unfamiliar equal, and du, an informal way of addressing your inferiors or family members. Which do Germans use when talking to God?

The Germans use the ‘’du’’ form.

Considering that God is a Father, just like your own father, God gets addressed in the more familiar form instead of the formal way.

After all we don’t call our own fathers in a formal way. Same with referring to God the Father.

The Christian practice of referring to God as father has roots in Hebrew where abba (father) is used to address God. There is some controversy about how formal this term is; some claim that the best translation of abba probably isn’t daddy, but something like papa might capture the feeling of abba.

Most importantly, this isn’t something restricted to Abrahamic religion. Odin is the Allfather. The Chinese sky god Tian is often referred to 天父, Tian Fu, which directly translates to heavenly father, while the Aboriginal Australian god Baiame is the sky father. Mother deities are more rare, but they do exist, for instance in Hindu Shaktism.

It looks like humans have this instinctive sense that someone is out there, someone powerful who loves us, protects us, and gives us structure and direction. For the overwhelming majority of people who survive past the age of two, that someone exists: it’s our parents.

Testable Predictions

The claim that God is a product of instinctive drives left over from infancy to connect with parents may provide us with a lovely model, but does it generate any testable predictions? And, are these actually borne out by the data? Here are three predictions I can check against existing research:

1. The failure to connect with and obey parents will be a risk factor for infant mortality.

2. Irreligious children will show worse (or more distant) relationships with their parents than religious children.

3. Echoing infant-parent communication, prayer to God will be a plea for help more often than other prayers such as thanks or praise.

4. Secure attachment, particularly in young children, will relate positively to belief in God.

1. Failure to connect with and obey parents as a risk factor for infant mortality

Infanticide is well known to traditional societies such as the Ache, among whom the rate of child homicide is reported to have been 14% for sons and 24% for daughters.62 This practice may continue to this day, with (controversial) sources attributing between 2% and 10% of crib death cases to infanticide.63

Understandably, data substantiating the idea that infants who do not bond well or submit to caregivers trustingly is sparse, and largely narrative. Parents convicted of infanticide often ask for help beforehand, complaining about difficult behavior:

[F]ive of ten patients had seen a doctor immediately preceding the crime, in some cases to complain about the child’s behaviour and to seek help in management.64

For example, one infanticide was preceded by an event described as a “feeding battle:”

‘Two weeks before a ten-week old girl arrived in hospital, moribund with bilateral subdural haematoma, her mother had caused a minor bruising to the baby's buttocks during a feeding battle. She had demonstrated the injury to the family doctor who, not realizing the significance of this “open warning”, reassured the mother that she had done no serious damage and prescribed a tranquilizer to calm her down.’65

The only solid statistical evidence available comes from a report on filicide in 20th century Hong Kong: “triggering factors in order of frequency were persistent crying and screaming, incontinence and disobedience, and 'provocative' behaviour.”66

Obviously these kinds of explanations could be interpreted as rationalizations on the part of the caregiver, but anyone who has had children will know that they differ dramatically in how easy they are and how much they trust their parents. The sixth child of the Apple Pie family took a great deal of rocking and calming even into year two, sometimes with bouts of crying lasting an hour or more. Though chilling to contemplate, it is not hard to see how the behaviors of a less trusting, less obedient child might incur infanticide from his or her parents.

2. Religiosity as a predictor of connection with parents

A 2013 study provides a straightforward confirmation:

Adult children who attended religious services more frequently were significantly more likely to provide assistance to parents, and they reported higher quality relationships and more frequent contact with both their fathers and mothers. Results were similar for sons and daughters, and for younger and older adult children.67

An even more interesting result was reported by a study published four years prior using data collected from 80 different US high schools:

Overall, religious discord predicts lower quality intergenerational relations. When parents value religion more than their teens do, adolescents tend to report poorer relations with parents. Relationship quality is not lower, however, when it is the adolescent who values religion more highly.68

The study authors explicitly state that their finding is difficult to explain conventionally. Shouldn’t all religious discord between parents and children predict poor relationships between them? But the answer is no, if elevated religiosity is the byproduct of a more strongly functioning instinct to love and submit to parents.

3. Prayer as a plea for help

This prediction is based on the idea of prayer as an echo of crying and other calls for help from parents. As I began writing, I was prepared to say that the data here do not support the model. In a sample of 100 churchgoers from the southeastern United States, supplicative prayers for help were not more common than prayers of thanks;69 a second study of 350 also found prayers of thanks are slightly more frequent than supplication,70 and a third study of 430 found supplication less frequent than adoration and thanksgiving.71

These studies definitely make it seem that when people pray, at least in a Western context, they are usually giving thanks to God. You’ll have to decide for yourself to what degree you think this disconfirms the model we’re discussing. However, it’s arguable that people with an instinctive sense of a benevolent someone “up there” could be more likely to ask for help when helpless, and more likely to give thanks when things are going well—and in fact this is the finding of an even larger study, which introduces a certain complication to the subject.

In 2008, Joseph Baker analyzed a community sample of 1721 individuals surveyed by Gallop. In that dataset, he found that people of lower social and financial status pray more frequently, and more supplicatively, than wealthy, high-status individuals. Although the presentation of their data made it difficult to determine exactly how much prayer was supplicative, their breakdown of topics for prayer (family, friends, health, adoration, finances, etc.) implies that most of the time people in their sample pray, they are asking God for something.72

Convenience and college samples are more often saturated with educated individuals in middle or high income backgrounds, an their prayers do not seem representative of the full spectrum of whatever it is that God has to listen to. But as Baker writes, “Results presented in this study… identify two ways income level influences prayer: through needs addressed that are influenced by social status and by making individuals more likely to make efforts to secure otherworldly favor.”

In conclusion, at this point I really don’t know how common different types of prayer are in America, let alone across our species, or how well this (doesn’t) fit with the model I’m presenting. At this time, we can at least say it isn’t a perfect fit with the data.

4. Secure attachment as a predictor of religiosity

This last prediction is the most directly tied to the model: Belief in gods is essentially a holdover from infant attachment instincts.

Extensive studies in object permanence show that animals don’t necessarily understand that when something leaves their field of view, it exists somewhere else and may return.73 Sensing that things don’t just go out of existence like the flame of a candle is a skill creatures have to develop—out of sight, out of existence seems to be the baseline belief of many neonate humans and adult mammals.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be the most difficult hypothesis to investigate from existing scientific literature. Although there had been a broad base of psychologists working on religion and attachment around the turn of the century, much of their published work was narrative rather than quantitative. For example, Lee Kirkpatrick has co authored numerous articles and even wrote a book reminiscent of the idea presented here, but his work invariably reads like an endless description of a model that’s never quite tested.

For an example of one of the better kinds of studies in this direction, a 1997 paper led by Jane Dickie found found obvious similarities between children’s sense of God’s personality and the way their parents treated them.74 But so what? Our sense of people is impacted by how people treat us—teachers, parents, our ex-girlfriend, whoever. I wouldn’t be surprised to find people’s image of God changed between spouses. It’s consistent with the idea that God is an extension of parents, but it doesn’t really address the question of whether we believe in God because we’re instinctively reaching upward since infancy.

The first report I found that directly checked the idea of attachment security and religiosity was a 2013 study on 481 Christian college alumni. The sample was reasonably large, but it did not likely include many secular individuals, and all of them were rather old, but they did check both intrinsic religiosity and Christian orthodoxy against attachment to mother and to father, finding small, statistically significant positive relationships across the board (all r’s ranging from 0.10 to 0.19).75 So this at least fits the prediction.

A better study in 2017 compared how close people felt to God:

The correspondence hypothesis predicts that people who feel closer to their parents feel closer to God, the compensation hypothesis predicts that people lacking a parent feel closer to God, and the socialized correspondence hypothesis predicts that people with nonreligious parents will feel less close to God if they feel closer to their parents. I find strong evidence in favor of the correspondence hypothesis, but I find no evidence in favor of the compensation hypothesis or the socialized correspondence hypothesis.

This was conventionally solid study. It’s sample came from the National Study of Youth and Religion and included 3370 people with a good age range, from 13-17. Obviously younger might have seemed better, but try talking to 10-year-olds seriously for a while and you’ll notice they aren’t very good at it. So this is probably the strongest piece of evidence that will secure attachment and belief in God are linked.

But my very favorite study, providing the most direct test of the model that I could find was carried out a bit earlier, was carried out by a team including the same Jane Dickie I mentioned earlier, in 2007, on a small sample of 40 children aged 5-7 from a variety of religious and secular homes.76

Why did I like this one so much? Well first of all, the setup was pretty neat. It placed the children in front of a black felt board with various figures, including a dog, a cross, a hospital bed, a bike, and a boy or girl to match the gender of the subject. The researchers then used the figures on the board to present the subject with a series of emotionally difficult situations, such as the death of a pet, or a child being left at home alone while parents were away. (Control situations included neutral scenarios such as a child playing happily outside.)

The children’s attachment security was measured using the Adapted Separation Anxiety Test, which looks at their responses to these scenarios. If the subjects understood the children in the scenario would be troubled, their responses were then coded as secure or insecure. In the event a child suggested taking action to alleviate the stress, for example by talking to the parents, finding a specific game to play independently, or looking for friends, this response was coded as secure. Insecure responses included not knowing what to do, acting aggressive or inconsistently towards parents, “catastrophic fantasies in which parents or child died,” or physical attacks on the examiner.

Immediately after each response was coded, the researcher gave the child a cross to represent God and asked, “Where do you think God is?” This is my very favorite part of the study, because the child’s closeness to God was then measured literally as the distance between the cross and the child on the felt board. Here are the distances recorded, in millimeters, for all the circumstances (including the “attachment neutral” control situations):

The way God was placed twice as far away in the non-religious homes is a great sanity check on their measurement. Right? Kids from religious homes put God nearby; others probably don’t believe in God, or whatever. But in all the scary, attachment activating cases, whether they came from religious or secular homes, the securely attached children—after they indicated how well they were coping with the scenario—put God closer to them than they did in the neutral situations (p < 0.05). The insecurely attached children just put God nearby if they’d been raised to do so.

The study has an obvious weakness: it’s pretty small. Nevertheless, so far as I can determine, the design and data analysis were good. Everything in science is always tentative, and further confirmations or disconfirmations would definitely be great. But when I put this together with everything else, it really looks to me as though kids have a sense of somebody there watching out for them which helps them cope with difficulties like parental disappearances, and then later in life that sense lingers on, continuing to tell them, whenever they’re lonely or in distress, “Don’t worry, someone is there, someone is there, someone is there.”

Everybody calls that somebody God, and the rest is history.

Summary

Religious people are different from others in some small ways—they’re slightly weaker at sane and analytical thinking, while also being somewhat more responsible and prosocial. But these relationships are small to medium at most, and religion is so ubiquitous that there seems to be something here that needs explaining.

Those who believe in God may not see anything to explain. If people believe in supernatural beings because, well, these beings really have been interacting with us for millennia, right?

I’m not so sure about this. I’m fine with the idea of supernatural entities out there that I’ve just never discovered, but a personal deity who cares about me, particularly a gendered, omnipotent, omnibenevolent one that I can learn all about in this handy-dandy holy book, seems pretty unlikely. Instead, I think the reason humanity as a whole is so attracted to the idea of God is because over thousands of generations of evolution, we learned as infants not to worry if we are in trouble, because there is someone there to help.

And the prediction I really, truly want to test says that every intelligent species which experiences a period of intense vulnerability and dependence on parents throughout infancy will tend to believe in God or gods. Because this is what I think: If we fly to distant stars, we may encounter other species, alien beings we can learn from. Or if we ever discover a means of communicating directly with dolphins, ravens, elephants, or other conspicuously intelligent creatures—creatures that rely on their parents to raise them while their complex brains develop—we should expect them to have analogous care-imagining instincts to our own.

But until we get a lot better at spacefaring, at detecting signals from the stars, or at talking to animals, this is a question that will have to remain unanswered.

1. Forming a family together is actually a good thing to do.

2. Value awesomeness lower and decency higher.

3. Stop ghosting.

4. A relationship is not supposed to serve sexual desire. It is sexual desire that should serve the relationship.

And she hopes it will work because,

Men like ideas, women like babies

which, as some commenters have mentioned, doesn’t exactly have its finger on the pulse of modern femininity.

Obviously I’m glossing over a bit. Tove’s article was a genuinely interesting read, and it’s worth seriously responding to here. Although the general idea is actually good, I think its value is difficult to see without exploring the opposing view—specifically, the claim that current dating sites are just fine as they are, because having fun without strings or commitment is a great thing.

One of her commenters, Performative Bafflement, takes this to an extreme with a somewhat statistically savvy argument on his own substack written In Defense of Sluts (of either sex) who are “better people on every important metric AND have more fun.”

My contribution will be a brief and much more savvy argument that sensible people interested in stable, happy marriages are well advised to steer clear of promiscuous partners. That’s the TL;DR of this post: If you want a pronatalist dating site, step 1 is “forget a pronatalist dating site,” and step 2 is “go for an honest dating site.”

Here is why.

Sluts are Better People on Every Important Metric?

Oh, I beg to differ. Because as some of you might be aware, I’ve recently put together this handy-dandy map of behavioral dysfunction by compiling dozens on studies on personality research into Emotionality and Honesty-Humility. See if anything jumps out at you as possibly relevant to the discussion at hand:

Risky Sexual Behavior (RSB) is psychologists’ polite way of describing what other people refer to as general sluttiness; specifically it’s described as sexual behaviors that “increase the chance that a sexually active individual will contract a sexually transmitted infection, or become pregnant, or make a partner pregnant,”1 sometimes including broader risks including “abortion or psychological distress.”2

I want to be clear that I’m totally fine with the idea that pleasure intrinsically contains an element of risk, and that the pleasure is very often worth the risk. Why not? Just being alive contains an element of risk. Every time you eat something there’s a chance you could get food poisoning. Going to the beach can give you skin cancer. Heck, I’ve walked past houses with cars crashed into them and thought, “Huh. That would really suck to be sleeping, and then have a car and bits of your bedroom wall on top of your face.”

Then again, some people have fun by baking a birthday cake, and other people have fun by jumping into an active volcano. And if we compare the the kinds of people who like using a little heat to bake cakes with the kinds of people who like using a lot of heat to prove their divinity, the former are probably different from the latter. Is the same true of people who wait for just the right person compared to those for whom, let’s say, lots of people are good enough?

Performative Bafflement insists that sluts (i.e. what he calls “Chads,” “Queens” and “Empresses”) not only have more fun, but “are UNAMBIGUOUSLY better on every important metric, and that if you truly care about mate quality, you should only date or marry one,” pointing out a few study results and concluding “Behold! They are even hotter and richer, from even better families, and even thinner!”

All of this is really great, but what matters for the present discussion is the finding that people who engage in risky sexual behavior (i.e. people everybody else calls “hoebags, mansluts, sex addicts, and assistant crack whores”) tend to have low Honesty-Humility.3 Given that low scores on Honesty-Humility predict a suite of negative traits like Narcissism, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Psychopathy, and given that they go along with a tendency towards bullying, gossip, mate guarding, criminality, addiction, and so on, and so forth, it might be reasonable to suspect that sluts are not quite better people on every important metric.

Of course, careful readers will have noticed that, so far, I’ve only cited one source for this claim—a meta analysis by Pletzer & others which isn’t really focused on sexual behaviors. Maybe I’m misreading the source, or maybe I’m erroneously conflating risky sexual behavior with what we’re actually talking about, which is women and men with

• higher body counts, and

• higher or unrestricted sociosexuality (which is another psychologist’s term for being the kind of person who thinks sex with random people is pretty great).

So what do you think? Do people with higher body counts and more promiscuous values really have lower Honesty-Humility?

Well, let’s take a look at some recent findings.

Both Higher Body Count and Higher Sociosexuality Implies Lower Honesty-Humility

Here’s a large study on over a thousand American college students from 2024:

Using a large college sample (N = 1030), results showed that both sociosexual behavior and attitude was associated with low Honesty-Humility (H), low Emotionality (E), and high Extraversion (X), whereas sociosexual desire was associated with low H, low Conscientiousness (C), and high Openness to Experience (O). Being sexually active was associated with low H, high X, and low O…4

The authors suggest that these relationships might partly arise from earlier sexual debut in individuals with low Honesty-Humility; at the very least, it’s easy to see how dishonest people might acquire a higher body count simply by starting earlier. Somewhat interesting is the way the optimistic, socially savvy Extraverts also show more sexuality. This is the half of the story Performative Bafflement wants to tell you, and it isn’t surprising; being assertive, sociable, energetic, and confident will get you more sex—if that’s the game you’re playing. But if you’re more honest and more ethical, then you might have more self control, or even be thinking of other things.

At least, that’s the finding of this study, and given the sample size it’s hard to dismiss as spurious. It’s also exactly what we would expect if risky sexual behaviors in general are basically the same as body count and sociosexuality.

Still, we might ask whether this really means people with higher body counts genuinely have other traits that go along with low Honesty-Humility. The only reason most people are going to say deficits in this personality trait are bad is because they predispose a person to other bad traits, too.

But is that the case? Does a higher body count, or a higher sociosexuality, predispose a person to other bad traits?

Higher Body Counts Imply A Greater Chance for Psychopathy and Borderline Personality Disorder

There’s been a lot of research on the subject; here’s a 2025 review by Kristopher Brazil:

Research on sexual behavior and clinical personality traits has mostly examined borderline, narcissism, and psychopathy. The strongest and most consistent link has been with psychopathy, which was strongly correlated with sociosexuality in a meta-analysis [21∗∗]. Psychopathy has also been linked to earlier sexual debut [22], more sexual partners [11,12,22], and other RSB indicators, including during adolescence [23]. Narcissism is also associated with sociosexuality [24∗]—but moderately so—and with indicators of RSB such as unprotected sex and having multiple sexual partners [11,24]. Narcissism, however, may not be linked to earlier sexual debut in adolescents [25]. Lastly, borderline personality disorder (BPD) features assessed as a diagnosis or trait are associated with having more sexual partners [26,27], suggesting more RSB in those with borderline features. However, BPD may involve some indicators of RSB (e.g., multiple sexual partners) but not others (e.g., unprotected sex) [28]. Longitudinally, BPD features in adolescent girls predicted increases in RSB over 4 years (but the reverse was not true), suggesting a predictive role of BPD on RSB [29∗]. Overall, studies have found that at least these three clinical personality traits—borderline, narcissism, and psychopathy—are associated with variation in sexual behavior, particularly engaging in riskier and/or uncommitted sex.5

These findings are unsurprising for people who pay attention to the things psychologists have been reporting for the last 50 years, but I know my readers have come to expect a certain amount of thoroughness from me. So just to be thorough, here’s the meta-analysis cited above finding high sociosexuality goes along with psychopathy:

A systematic and exhaustive search based on the inclusion criteria identified 48 independent samples across 37 studies consisting of 15,471 participants. Four potential meta-moderators were tested: sex, age, trait psychopathy measurement scale, and college student status. Applying a random-effects model, the summary effect determined a positive correlation between trait psychopathy and unrestricted sociosexual orientation r = 0.31, Z test = 16.68, p < .001, 95 % CI [0.27, 0.34]6

Here’s the relevant study on psychopathy and body count, which also shows people who are sexually preoccupied are more psychopathic:7

As an aside, the relationship between psychopathy and sexual preoccupation can be seen informally just by looking at what happens to my comment sections when I write about sex. The great irony of psychology is that it attracts so many cerebral leftists, while so frequently substantiating traditional stereotypes. Then again, I do think conservatives often go overboard in jumping to conclusions about all promiscuous people being bad, or promiscuity itself being de facto immoral, when I can see most people are pretty moral, even on the slutty side of things. To put it another way, fewer than 10% of people have a diagnosis of psychopathy or Borderline Personality Disorder, but over 50% of Westerners have a body count in the double digits:

But mostly, I want to verify the situation with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD):

Using a survey methodology in a consecutive sample of internal medicine outpatients (N = 354), we administered two self-report measures for BPD (the borderline personality scale of the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-4 and the Self-Harm Inventory), and queried participants, “How many sexual partners have you had in your lifetime?” …[W]e found that the mean number of sexual partners among BPD-positive participants was nearly double (p < .001) that of BPD-negative participants; according to BPD status with the Self-Harm Inventory, the mean number of sexual partners among BPD-positive participants was more than double (p < .001) that of BPD-negative participants. Compared to internal medicine outpatients without BPD, those with BPD exhibit a statistically significantly greater number of sexual partners.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Borderline Personality Disorder before, it’s a kind of feminine mirror to masculine psychopathy, and consists of five core symptoms:

• Stormy Emotional Instability: Intense mood swings within hours or days, often tied to external triggers.

• Black-and-White Thinking (Splitting): Seeing others as either perfect saviors or the worst enemies.

• Desperate Fear of Abandonment: Real or imagined rejection can trigger frantic efforts to avoid being left alone.

• Impulsivity and Self-Destructive Behavior: Risky driving, binge eating, overspending, or self-harm.

• Distorted Self-Image: Feeling empty, unstable, or lacking a sense of identity.

If you’re interested, I’ve written extensively about BPD elsewhere, but right now I just want to remind everyone that these are many of the high-body-count people Performative Bafflement is calling the cream of the crop, the best partners, the chads, queens, and empresses, because they are slightly more attractive, with slightly better prestige. Once again, yes, I’m sure all of that is really great.

But I think you should pause for a moment.

I think you should ask yourself whether the kind of person who has a bit more charisma, a bit more education, and a bit more status, while also being characterized by the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder, is best described as a queen, an empress, or… something else.

OK but Do Sluts Actually Do Bad Things?

“So they are more likely to have a diagnosis,” a skeptic might say. “Big deal! Are people with high body counts likely to actually do bad things? And don’t forget they still have more fun!”

And fine; why don’t we continue playing along with this ignorant, implausible, uneducated idea and see what kinds of fun these high body count people have been getting into?

Bullying

[P]ure physical bullying was positively associated with the number of dating and sexual partners, primarily for adolescent boys.8

Having Been Bullied

Cross-sectional data from 145,342 adolescents aged 12–15 years participating in the Global School-based Student Health Survey 2003–2016 were analyzed… Compared with those who were not bullied in the past 30 days, those who were bullied for 20–30 days were 2.08 (95% CI = 1.65–2.63), 1.70 (95% CI = 1.10–2.63), and 1.72 (95% CI = 1.12–2.67) times more likely to report sexual intercourse, non-condom use, and multiple sex partners, respectively.9

Crime

Empirical research has revealed a positive relationship between number of sex partners and involvement in antisocial behaviors. Most attempts to explain this association have taken an evolutionary perspective and argued that the same traits (e.g., impulsiveness, shortsightedness, and aggressiveness) that are related to a large number of sex partners are also related to criminal involvement. However, there is also reason to believe that the covariation between sex partners and crime behaviors can be partially explained by a common genetic pathway, where genes that are related to sex partners are also related to antisocial conduct. We test this possibility by using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Specifically, we examine whether variants of the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1) are associated with number of sexual partners and with adult criminal behavior. The results of our analyses reveal two broad findings. First, and in line with prior research, we find that there is a strong positive association between sex partners and antisocial behavior. Second, DAT1 explains variation in both number of sexual partners and in criminal conduct for males. We speak to the implications of our findings.10

Drugs and Cigarettes

High risk sexual behavior was significantly associated with antisocial behavior, cigarette smoking, and illicit drug or alcohol use11

Mental Disorders and Suicidality

The present study examined the relationship between sexual behaviors and mental disorders and suicidality in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, a representative sample of adults ages 18 years and older (N = 5,692). The World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview was used to make DSM-IV based disorder diagnoses. Participants were also asked about suicidality and sexual behaviors. Multiple logistic regression analyses adjusted for sociodemographic variables were used to examine the relationships of three sexual behaviors (age of first intercourse, number of past year partners, and past year condom use) with 15 mental disorders (clustered into any mood, anxiety, substance use, and disruptive behavior groups) and suicidality (ideation and attempts). Compared to ages 15–17, those with age of first intercourse between 12 and 14 had increased rates of lifetime disruptive behavior, substance use, and any mental disorder, and suicidal ideation and attempts (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) range, 1.46–2.01). Those with age of first intercourse between ages 18–25 and 26–35 were at decreased likelihood of several lifetime disorder groups (AOR range, 0.19–0.81). Individuals who had two or more sexual partners in the past year had increased rates of all past year disorder groups examined (AOR range, 1.44–5.01). Never married participants who rarely/never used condoms were more likely than those who always used condoms to experience any mood, substance use, and any mental disorder, and suicide attempts (AOR range, 1.77–8.13). Future research should longitudinally examine these associations and account better for possible familial and personality confounders.12

Getting Divorced, or Not Getting Married at all

being separated/divorced or single/never married, being a current or former smoker, and drinking alcohol regularly or frequently were independently associated with a higher number of sexual partners in both men and women.13

It’s almost as though the very obvious story of sluts often being bad / impatient / purposeless / dishonorable / unable-to-control-their-behavior has been the story all along. Among those people, those who are a bit better looking and have some more cash are more likely to have been more successful at the game, but just playing is a sign you may not be a great person.

Maybe not you personally! I’m sure you’re swell. Maybe not your auntie Emma who’s been around. Of course she’s very nice! But taken as a whole, the Salaciously Lewd Underwear Toggling Society is riddled with the kinds of spiders, snakes, and people you want absolutely nothing to do with if you are trying to find a spouse to raise a family.

Conclusion

The good news for Tove is that you can use this information to your advantage. Starting a dating site for pronatalists is fraught with problems:

1. Hard to attract women :(

2. Some people who sign up will be creeps :o

So lets solve those problems with this last finding from a 2025 study on 5,331 individuals spanning five continents—across the world, people with fewer sexual partners are more likely to desire marriage:14

If all of the signals of being a good spouse and a good parent are the same as the signals for being a good pronatalist, that’s what you really want. Forget the sluts, go for the angels. Go for the low body count, honest, sincere, forthright, loyal people out there who want a long term relationship. In your advertizing, stress strong bonds, finding a soul-mate, building a life. Put children in the background and the images—holidays, family gatherings, Christmas trees. Discourage sex on the first date. Warn users this is not the platform for finding a one night stand. Attract users to the ideal of a stable, happy life at home, because that’s where children arrive and thrive.

Then make the site explicitly about verified, moderated, high-accountability dating, with rules that enforce:

• Honesty. Require key profile claims be limited to things that can be independently verified (e.g. “I’m a man in finance because here’s my proof of employment, I’m 6’5” with blue eyes because here’s my driver’s license”)

• No lying. Users pay a deposit; proof of dishonesty on their profile means they lose half their deposit.

• No ghosting. After a date, users must inform their date within three days of non-renewal through the app or lose half their deposit.

• No cruelty or harassment. If cruelty or harassment can be established, the user loses half of his or her deposit.

• Protecting the community. Try giving points for identity verification and reporting bad faith users.

This is an idea that can work for an implicitly pronatalist dating app.

For the rest of us, whether you want children or not, the best dating advice I can give you is to just use your eyes to figure out if your date is good looking, educated, and successful enough for him or her to measure up. Of those who meet your standards, the way to vet them is:

1. Stay away from sluts,

2. Don’t have sex on the first date, and

3. Good luck!

On the one hand, people at r/AutisticPride compresses the entire spectrum into a single way of being with statements like,

Autism is a neurotype in which certain aspects of the brain develop in different directions compared to an allistic (not Autistic) person’s brain… Autistic people are connected by common experiences, challenges, vulnerabilities, interests, habits and inequities.

And then on the other hand, Aimee Grant at The Conversation says there is so much variety within autistic people as a whole that there is no Autistic spectrum at all:

Autism is made up of many different traits and needs, which show up in unique combinations. Some autistic people rely heavily on routine, while others find comfort in repetitive movements known as “stimming”. And some have an intense focus on particular topics, a concept researchers call “monotropism”.

There are also known links with physical conditions such as hypermobility. Because autism is made up of all these different elements, there can be no single line on which every autistic person is placed.

It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at this kind of argument, particularly when the motivation behind it is made explicit:

Underlying all these debates is a deeper concern that dividing autistic people into categories, or arranging them on a spectrum, can slip into judgments about their value to society. In the most extreme form, such hierarchies risk dehumanising those with higher support needs. It’s something some autistic campaigners warn could fuel harmful political agendas.

But we’ve actually known for years that autism really is a multifactoral construct—in plain English, this means a person can be autistic in more than one way. In 2007 the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) was examined under factor analysis which found two factors, Social Affect and Restricted, Repetitive Behaviors;1 this has since been confirmed in later versions of the ADOS.23

The Social Affect factor consists of things like,

• “Unusual Eye Contact”

• “Gaze and Other Behaviors”

• “Frequency of Vocalization"

• “Quality of Social Overtures” and

• “Gestures,”

while Repetitive Behaviors includes,

• “Stereotyped Language,”

• “Unusual Sensory Interest,”

• “Repetitive Interests,” and

• “Hand Mannerisms.”

Of course, there are many more tools for measuring autism, like the standard Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised, or self-report scales such as the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) or the Subthreshold Autism Trait Questionnaire (SATQ). They essentially measure the same thing,45 though we might wonder how they could end up working roughly the same way if they’re different scales.

It helps to understand that any psychometric questionnaire is essentially a series of statements people agree or disagree with, all added up and given a name. Even though there may be many factors underlying autism, and even though there are often clinical protocols and sophisticated statistics at play, you don’t really have to bother with them. You could just come up with items to measure what looks like “IDK, autism?” and give them to 500 people, and what you’ll get will actually be useful and interesting and meaningful because some people answer differently from others. You just shouldn’t be surprised that you’re ultimately measuring the same things as other people with their scales measuring “introversion” or “inflexibililty” or “sensitivity:”

[W]e have shown across two studies that a majority of scales designed to measure ARTs [Autism-Related Traits] in the general population can plausibly be located within the space described by the FFM [Five Factor Model], and that some of these scales approach redundancy with existing FFM facets. These findings suggest that at least some ARTs may be contiguous with ‘‘normal’’ personality traits (or potential ‘‘sibling constructs’’), as has previously been demonstrated for other clinically relevant traits.6

The paper quoted above is referencing work from the older five factor model. More modern research gives a slightly clearer picture, with different subscales of two measures of autism showing correlations past to r = -0.6 with Extraversion and r = -0.2 with Openness; regression analysis has both low Extraversion and low Openness emerging as significant predictors of autism scores, and “HEXACO accounted for 35.8% of the variance in autistic traits measured by the AQ and 37.2% of the variance in the SATQ.”9

Because the AQ is a self-report instrument, I did wonder whether this had been confirmed using the more carefully administered ADOS. What I found was a 2016 study comparing the average personalities of two groups of autistic individuals with a third group who, after treatment, no longer qualified as autistic; those who were no longer autistic scored higher in Extraversion than both autistic groups, and higher in Openness than one autistic group.7

This is exactly what we would expect if autism were basically what you get when a person is very introverted, and rather low in Openness to Experience. It isn’t a surprising result, but personally, I think its really useful, not only because it suggests possible treatments for autism (see if it’s possible to raise Extraversion and Openness), and likely friendship pools for autists in the general population (basically anywhere introverts roam). But also, it allows the rest of us who aren’t really on the spectrum at all to hear “autistic” and immediately translate to “introverted, slightly unimaginative” and get on with our lives.

Are you sure that’s it? That’s really all there is to autism?

Well, if you’re not too keen to get on with your life, there might be more to the story.

When doctors are making a diagnosis of autism, they won’t likely use a framework like the ADOS alone. Generally they’ll also combine this with a structured interview,8 and consider a number of additional issues, like a person’s general risk factors for autism spectrum disorder:9

Clever readers may suspect I underlined the schizophrenia-like-psychosis risk in red for a reason. In fact, while the AQ is known to be a good screening tool for autism in the general population, it also returns elevated scores for people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.10 Some researchers have concluded from these findings that the AQ has poor discriminant validity since it can’t distinguish autistic and psychotic people,11 but is this really a problem with the scale if autistic traits predispose a person to psychotic experiences?12

We can verify this relationship the other way as well—Having a family history of schizophrenia (along with ADHD, intellectual disability, and other personality disorders) also increases the risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder:13

This is what we would suspect if there were a genetic link between schizophrenia risk and autism spectrum disorders. And well, when we look at polygenic scores, it turns out, there is a genetic link between schizophrenia risk and autism spectrum disorders:

We also found an indirect pathway suggesting that the association between genetic risk for ASD and psychotic experiences may be mediated by social impairment…14

So how do we account for this using a dimensional model like the HEXACO? Although research is still sparse, we do know there’s actually a seventh trait called Disintegration (D) that describes a person’s overall level of psychosis or schizophrenia-proneness through traits like general executive dysfunction, perceptual distortions, paranoia and conspiracy beliefs, and magical thinking. To date, we’re missing modern studies measuring D in autistic subjects; Disintegration is too new a concept to have been widely used for what we’re after. The best proxies we have for D are scales measuring schizotypy, like the O-life (available here; I recommend trying the short form to get a feel for the questions).

I’ll say right now that I do realize many people like to bandy about the notion that traits from autistic and schizophrenic clusters are somehow opposite to one another. Scott Alexander has said this very directly: “a lot of features of schizophrenia and autism seem to be opposites of each other.” But we’ve known for more than a decade that a common psychotic-prone personality underlies both kinds of traits. For example, research from 2011 found measures of schizotypy (the O-Life) and autism (the AQ) correlate at r = 0.46 (p < 0.001).15 This kind of relationship isn’t what we would expect from the general schizotypy profile, which shows only modestly reduced Extraversion, combined with increased Openness (again using the O-LIFE).16

Further research in the same vein confirms autism is related to all facets of schizotypy—positive, negative, and disorganized—as well as generalized conspiracy beliefs and endorsement of misinformation:17

In other words, autism is probably more than just introversion with a dash of mundane-mindedness; there’s some underlying weirdness there as well, making autists close cousins to schizophrenics and schizotypes.18

What all the diagnoses really mean

The main takeaway from all this is that there’s no need for autism as a diagnosis; we can just use regular personality traits like introversion, (low) Openness, and general Disintegration or psychosis-proneness to describe autism.

If we do want to talk about a “spectrum,” that spectrum is just Disintegration, a general predisposition to mental disorders. Ideally, what we would have is a clean measure of Disintegration, free of contamination from the other HEXACO traits, and then, a study comparing “all the diagnoses” to that. Until then, when we want to clarify where every diagnosis lies in terms of Disintegration, we’re left with some indirect inferences drawn from a series of studies, and you’re free to interpret how unhinged you think autism, ADHD, Bipolar, and OCD really are. But for everything else, the picture emerging after decades of research is…

• Asexual: “Introverted, imaginative.”19

• Autistic: “Introverted, slightly unimaginative. Also a bit unhinged.”2021

• ADHD: “Disorganised, spidery, and a bit unhinged.”2223

• Bipolar: “Unhinged.”24

• Depressed: “Introverted and unhinged.”25

• Dyslexic: “Has trouble reading… Not much else, really”26

• OCD: “A bit introverted, possibly well organized, probably unhinged.”27

• Paranoid: “Unhinged and vaguely antisocial.”28

• Psychopath / Grandiose Narcissist: “Classic Serpent—dishonest and unemotional.”29

• Schizophrenic: “Badly unhinged.”3031

• Schizotypal: “Unhinged, slightly introverted, perhaps a bit imaginative.”32

• Vulnerable Narcissist / BPD: “Introverted Spider—dishonest and emotional”3334

At this time, the only diagnosis which shows a clear separation from broad personality traits is dyslexia. Congratulations, dyslexics! You have a diagnosis that really exists, in the sense that we absolutely need it to describe what’s going on for you—there’s no meaningful way to represent what’s going on with your inability to read with Extraversion, Conscientiousness, or any other psychological trait—not even IQ.3536

Everyone else with a diagnosed mental condition: it’s still possible that you’re quite special! But there are signs that your diagnosis is just evidence you have an unusual and maybe not-so-great personality. Of course, even if it’s true, this wouldn’t mean you shouldn’t be accommodated, it wouldn’t mean we shouldn’t make an effort to understand you, and it wouldn’t mean you shouldn’t receive the help you need. What it would mean is that the reason you may need accommodations, understanding, and assistance is because of these broad personality traits which make it difficult for everyone who has them to interact with others, regardless of the label we apply.

That’s all a diagnosis is: a label. For a long time the labels seemed to be useful, but as the labels proliferate and diagnoses become more flexible, the question arises as to whether the labels are useful anymore. Maybe we’re finally reaching the point that we’re better off without them. This is very much the way I feel.

But a common thread that ran through many comments was the sense that I believed men’s and women’s bad behaviour were largely mirrored: “Bad men openly and physically screw you, while bad women scheme and plot and smile when you drown.”

This isn’t what the data says. This idea merely compares serpents with more serpents. When they have the upper hand serpents can take what they want without your stopping them, but other times serpents need to be cunning and underhanded to prevent your being aware of what they are doing.

I’m not very interested in serpents. I’m trying to tell you about a different kind of creature that doesn’t have a straightforward existence in our modern folk consciousness—but there is a story that comes close, and if you let me tell it in a slightly different way from what you’re used to, the meaning might become more clear:

This post is about the spiders: what they are like, what motivates them, and why it’s so hard even to understand that they exist.

It’s very easy to understand people who actively try to do harm for their own benefit. Some bad people openly and physically screw you over; some other bad people scheme and plot and smile when you drown; but ultimately they’re the same kinds of people, and they’re mostly men. Maybe they were trying to get back at you, but more likely, you mean nothing to them. This is the pattern of low-emotionality exploitation. It’s just business. It’s just that they wanted something from you. It’s just that they’re selfish and greedy and don’t care.

But other bad people do care. They care about what you do. They care about what you think. They care about how you feel. Maybe they hate you, but oh… love and hate are similar things! Or maybe they used to care about you, enough to make you depend on them before they vanished without a word. Or maybe they don’t hate you at all, and they only wish you well. Maybe it seemed they harmed you, but wasn’t it really for the best? Or they were just teasing. Or they are so sorry. Or it was your fault! You deserved it! Just let them tell you what you did and how it made them feel! You know how fragile they are, how sensitive they are! And sometimes—sometimes they tried so hard to build you up, and it hurt them and confused them so much when somehow, inexplicably, you starting screaming and cursing their name as you went down.

This is the pattern of high-emotionality victimization. And it’s difficult even to see it straightforwardly as victimization because there’s usually no clear motive regarding what they could have even wanted. All too often, there is concern. All too often, there is empathy. What’s missing are vague, slippery concepts like accountability, consistency, and maturity. All too often, it seems to be unintentional or even completely unconscious, a compulsion to harm others even if it harms the self.

It manifests as Momster, who doesn’t know how to stop terrifying her kids. It manifests as the wife who can’t stand it unless her husband texts “I love you” every day, because “What you see as being needy, I see as a necessity.” It manifests as insecurely attached husbands and wives1 who justify their string of infidelities on a need for space in the relationship.2 It manifests as vulnerable narcissicts lying on their dating profile and breadcrumbing their suitors before ghosting them and moving onto the next victim person they care about.3

While this is obviously a gendered issue, it isn’t gender itself that’s the cause. This is where many people get lost, because they want to simplify things and just have men be bad, or women be bad, or both be bad in their uniquely gendered way. What we now have is strong evidence that bad behaviors are all generally manifestations of low Honesty-Humility, with the masculine flavors emerging with low Emotionality, and feminine flavors emerging with high Emotionality, because men and women describe themselves, and are described as others, as strongly differring in Emotionality:4

From a research standpoint, this entire map is interesting in terms of how well it substantiates the map of traits and behaviors we’ve been talking about. But what I really want you to do is look carefully at the adjectives on the bottom right, because this is where the spiders live. Borderline Personality Disorder is aptly represented by the terms impressionable, melodramatic, and clingy; Vulnerable Narcissists have envious, pretentious, vain, cowardly, insecure, and snobbish. We don’t see obvious signs of alcoholism or drug addiction, but there’s gossipy, signs of mate guarding with jealous, and hints of mental disorders with defensive and irrational.

And all of the problems with the bottom left corner show up neatly and tidily as well: Grandiose Narcissisism is comfortably represented with arrogant and egocentric. Machiavellianism shows up as scheming, calculating, insincere, and cunning. Psychopaths are a bit harder to pick out without obvious markers for violence and criminality, but there are definitely hints with reckless, ruthless, heartless, disrespectful, and selfish.

If you look at the map I made last time, behaviors and traits outside single adjectives tell the same story:

Evidently the mistake I made when I created this map last time was leaving out that cluster of manipulativeness, cynicism, and calculated self-interest known as Machiavellianism. Now while the exact position of these traits varies slightly depending on the instrument used and the sample being tested, our old friend Nicollo Machiavelli is well known to live in the lower left quadrant somewhere near (-0.23, -0.57), nestled snugly amidst his cousins psychopathy and grandiose Narcissism.5 And while there is definitely a lot to dislike about Machiavelli, the bad behaviors in the emotional bottom right are not exactly his purview.

In some ways, the area at the bottom right corner is familiar; most people probably recognise it as a cluster of dysfunctional behaviors you see in people who have trouble getting their lives together. But thinking about these people as quirky or nutty tends to make our focus slide away from the reality of life down there. These people don’t just need help. The behaviors they show are more than merely eccentric or maladaptive.

What’s interesting is that the suite of destructive actions and tendencies at the bottom right is systematically related to deficits in morality, as measured by ordinary tests of Honesty-Humility; low scorers endore items like “If I want something from someone, I will laugh at that person’s worst jokes,” or “If I knew that I could never get caught, I would be willing to steal a million dollars,” or “I want people to know that I am an important person of high status.”

We can see these people are dishonest and pretentious, but we have trouble grasping they are genuinely villainous because they look like victims. After all, weren’t you paying attention? Don’t you have a heart? This is what the story of the spider and the frog is—the tragic story of an innocent, victimised spider.

Victims Are Not Villains

As a species, we have a noteworthy preoccupation with protecting women. Although the reasons for this are likely complex, the extreme vulnerability and duration of infancy in our species provides a very obvious justification for this.

Nowadays we tend to think of women as naturally just, well, women. But in traditional societies most women spent most of their lives as mothers, which is a significantly different sort of person. A man can be expected to defend himself, and a child to at least run away, but mothers are extremely vulnerable. If our ancestors hadn’t been sensitive toward young mothers with morning sickness, gravid mothers unable to flee from predators, and nursing mothers with delicate babies at their breasts, they would have faced serious difficulties with reproduction; similar reluctance to harm men might get a person killed during a raid.

The outcome is that most humans in most places show biased concern regarding harm to women. One of my favorite researchers in the field is Tanya Reynolds, who, along with Maja Graso, reports straightforwardly that this bias gives women an advantage over men: “one major domain where women are advantaged relative to men is soliciting observers’ concern over their suffering… across numerous contexts, harm to women is perceived as more severe, troubling and unacceptable than identical harm befalling men.”6

Their evidence includes findings like:

• In hypothetical and virtual reality trolley dilemmas, subjects were less willing to push a woman onto the tracks to her death than a man. (This bias disappeared when the woman was too old to be pregnant or nursing young children.)

• In a study on utilitarian-style reasoning, subjects were less supportive of a policy offending women than men, even if it benefitted many people.

• In general, subjects overestimate the degree of hiring discrimination against women and underestimate the degree of discrimination against men.

Complementing these results are another series of studies by Reynolds finding that we have a bias toward thinking of victims as women—and we have a bias toward thinking of harmful people as men:

Study 1 participants assumed a harmed target was female (versus male), but especially when labeled ‘victim’. Study 2 participants perceived animated shapes perpetuating harm as male and victimized shapes as female. Study 3 participants assumed a female employee claiming harassment was more of a victim than a male employee making identical claims. Female victims were expected to experience more pain from an ambiguous joke and male perpetrators were prescribed harsher punishments (Study 4). Managers were perceived as less moral when firing female (versus male) employees (Study 5). The possibility of gender discrimination intensified the cognitive link between women and victimhood (Study 6). Across six studies in four countries (N = 3,137), harm evaluations were systematically swayed by targets’ gender, suggesting a gender bias in moral typecasting.7

I’m always reluctant to speculate on this blog; I usually like to cleave closely to what the reasearch says. But I think this bias is visible in the first plot I showed above, where moral and ethical are both found in the feminine, high-Emotional side of the map. I think without this bias, we would think of morality and ethics as shifted to the left, slightly negatively related to Emotionality. Moreover, I think this is part of what makes it so difficult for us to confront the lower right corner directly and see it for what it truly is. Definitely this bias comes to the fore when it comes to victimisation, because we have a natural tendency to presume that a victim is not a villain:

Although competitive individuals reported more frequent disclosure of same-gender peers’ violations, women’s competitiveness was unrelated to how upset they felt by or how readily they detected friends’ violations… That is, by merely possessing heightened standards for their own treatment, even non-competitive women may effectively compete with same-gender peers for social resources. Indeed, perhaps because these disclosures often result from earnestly hurt feelings (rather than intentions to denigrate perpetrators), they are less readily recognized as gossip.8

Tanya Reynolds doesn’t really discuss personality. She notes women seem to damage the reputations of competitors by releasing information about personal disappointments and their experience of pain in a way that evades detection as gossip. But when we look at the map above, it isn’t hard to see where feelings of victimization are most acute: where all people—not necessarily women, but people in general—are oversensitive, melodramatic, negative, petty, and complaining. And it isn’t unreasonable to suspect where gossip-that-doesn’t-count-as-gossip is most frequent: right where gossip that does count as gossip is absolutely rampant, in the lower right quadrant of our personality space.

People low in Honesty-Humility and high in Emotionality wander through life in a state of perpetual vulnerability. Their propensity for dichotomous thinking means they see things in black and white, their lack of mental health and rationality leaves them prone to unrealistic ideas, and their affective empathy means they absorb the anger and disappointment of people responding to their pretentiousness. But rather than see them as straightforwardly trying to wreck other people’s reputations, those of us watching from the sidelines are perennially confused because of the way their actions seem a natural response to pain. Their destructiveness doesn’t merely seem justified: it’s invisible because it arises from bruised feelings rather than an explicit, conscious desire for personal gain.

As Bad as Psychopaths

This lack of conscious desire to do wrong is perhaps the greatest block to seeing emotional people as villains. If they don’t intend any harm, what do they want? This may not be easy to answer, but it might help if we can see clearly what it is that they do.

There have been a series of studies that can help us to understand people at the bottom of the map, regardless of their gender, because they compare two analagous traits: Grandiose Narcissism, and Vulnerable Narcissism. Both forms of Narcissism correlate negatively with Honesty-Humility, but check the second map above and you’ll find Grandiose Narcissism correlates negatively with Emotionality, and Vulnerable Narcissism positively with Emotionality (r = -0.31 vs +0.53, respectively).9

The comparison isn’t perfect, as other traits differ between them too, like Extraversion (higher in grandiose and lower in vulnerable Narcissism). But each form of Narcissism does a decent job of representing its corner of the map. And several empirical findings round out the contrasting flavor of the different forms of Narcissism:

• Grandiose Narcissists are preoccupied with building muscle, while vulnerable narcissists are prone to anorexia and bulimia.10

• Grandiose Narcissists are somewhat proud of their bodies; vulnerable Narcissists objectify and are ashamed of their bodies.11 (This is what would be predicted just by personality, since in an unrelated study, body shame correlated with E & H at r = 0.38 & -0.25, repectively;12 it also suggests that some aspect of the body positivity movement may be a response to the personality problems of people within it.)

• Grandiose Narcissists are somewhat satisfied with life, while vulnerable Narcissists are slightly dissatisfied (r ~ ±0.2).13

• Grandiose Narcissists tend to suffer from imposter syndrome and have a somewhat weak sense of self (r ~ 0.3); vulnerable Narcissists could be defined by imposter syndrome and their profoundly weak sense of self—e.g. “It’s hard for me to figure out my own personality, interests, and opinions,” and “I need other people to help me understand what I think or how I feel.” (r ~ 0.7).14

Correlations near 0.7 are very rare in the psychology, because the instruments used have lower reliability than in the hard sciences. Correlations like this only appear when measures and outcomes are closely aligned.

Particularly interesting beyond the numbers themselves are the experiences of partners of both grandiose and vulnerable Narcissists documented by Ava Green and Kathy Charles.15 Victims of grandiose Narcissists would describe their partners as “always mad for no reason,” and indicate that “the minute I stood up against him or he felt he was losing control he would get aggressive and violent.”

Yet while the threats and abuse of grandiose Narcissists were terrifying, they were also easier to identify and talk about afterwards. The situation was different with vulnerable Narcissists, who were seen “to manipulate in ways to inspire more sympathy, power, and control from their partners and to keep them in a heightened state of codependent anxiety…” Their victims became increasingly isolated as they cut ties with others. And the aftermath is something I find very, very sad because of its haunting familiarity:

Data transcripts from the participants who had been with a vulnerable narcissist appear to have a more idiosyncratic style with less psychologized language in their recollections… participants were unable to find a label or cause for the behavior of their partners and were “working this out” through the dialogue in their interviews.16

This is what I have been insisting about villainy in the bottom right corner: good people struggle to fathom what motivates it. It doesn’t even appear often enough in film for me to point to anything you’ve watched and say, “Come on. You know! It’s like that.” When I finally watched Tangled with Mrs. Pie last year, I immediately saw the same thing she did—this interaction could have taken place between herself and her mother:

The trouble is that, in the Disney film, the evil mother has an obvious motive for keeping her victim nearby because Rapunzel is the source of Gothel’s immortality. When her ruse of familial affection fails, Gothel admits to being the bad guy and chains Rapunzel up in an effortless pivot from manipulation to domination. She’s an agentic, consciously motivated villain. Mrs. Pie and her mother do look and sound like Rapunzel and Gothel, but without any magic, any immortality, any understable reason for the mother to undermine, gaslight, and manipulate her daughter into staying around.

The partners of male vulnerable Narcissists in Green and Charles’ study said the same kinds of things as they tried to work out what had happened in their own relationships:

He would never admit that “I never want to lose you” but I think he was so afraid of losing me that he turned into the victim just to keep me.17

Just like the partners of grandiose Narcissists, the partners of vulnerable Narcissists have a strong incentive to leave if they can, in order to escape the abuse that forms their social reality. But when we compare the two types of Narcissism, we find one is much more predictive of abuse than the other. Which one?

Specifically, in a 2020 study of Intimate Partner Violence, Grandiose Narcissism predicted only emotional abuse from men against their partners. However, Vulnerable Narcissism in men predicted physical and sexual abuse, and in women, it predicted all forms of abuse—physical, emotional, and sexual.18

These comparisons are interesting, and lead naturally to a more disturbing question: What about child abuse? It would come as no surprise to learn that Narcissism is predictive of child abuse—but which flavor of Narcissism is the stronger predictor? When I was growing up, this kind of question would be rhetorical, or spur discussion of what these forms of Narcissism are and whether we could more easily imagine a grandiose or vulnerable abuser. But this is 2025, and the information is right here:

[T]he present meta-analysis aimed to examine the extent to which child maltreatment is associated with vulnerable and grandiose narcissism, and whether these associations differed by study or sample characteristics…. A total of 15 studies (N = 9,141 participants) producing 129 effect sizes were included. Results showed that child maltreatment was positively related to both vulnerable narcissism (mean r = .198; p < .001) and grandiose narcissism (mean r = .087; p < .001)19

So I could probably rest my case at this point. These findings are from a meta-analysis, and they do clearly align with what I’ve been saying: the worst abusers are emotional. But even a meta analysis can give an incorrect picture if there is some problem consistent across all the studies. So I wondered, could there have been some systematic bias, or error, or detail that was smoothed over by the process of combining 15 studies together and seeing what they say?

After looking around, I found a way to check on this finding: we can look at an intermediary scale called the Child Abuse Potential inventory, or the CAP. The CAP has been used since 1979 as a screening tool for child abuse, when items were first found to discriminate between 19 abusers and 19 matched controls.20 The content of the inventory includes questions like:

• “My home must be spotless,”

• “I do not trust most people,”

• “Things have usually gone against me in life,” and

• “I have many personal problems.”

Shortly after development, the CAP was validated on a larger sample of 200,21 and has since then become widely used.22 The reason the CAP is worth checking is because there’s a great deal of child misreatment that goes undiscovered, which would tend to minimize or obscure genuine relationships with personality traits. A screening tool for risk factors related to child abuse may contraindicate other findings or reveal something unexpected. So, who scores higher on this inventory?

Well, a team of researchers investigated that question in 2015 with a community sample of 178 people (67% female), finding the total correlation between the CAP screening tool and grandiose Narcissism was r = 0.02, and Vulnerable Narcissism was r = 0.42 (p < 0.01).23 So my conclusion is:

Psychopaths, Narcissists, and garden-variety criminals sow fear and discord among good people. They steal, rape, and kill. Yet, are these really the people who are responsible for most of the misery in the world? I can’t tell you how you are supposed to weigh these acts against spousal abuse and child abuse. But I can tell you that the prevalece of these problems is very different.

Check the FBI Crime Stats: the property crime rate in America is around 200 per 100,000 people. Rape is harder to count, but the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has 41.4 per 100,000 per year; the murder rate in America is around 5 per 100,000. But intimate partner violence is given by the CDC in terms of lifetime percentages, with around 40% of women and 25% of men having experienced sexual aggression, physical assault, or stalking by a partner at any point. The sex differences are interesting, partly because they aren’t what this model predicts, though the academic literature also suggests men may be underreporting the abuse they receive.24252627 And as for child abuse? According to 2020 data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the annual rate was 0.84%,28 with women being the more common abuser. [EDIT: See the pinned comment—the percentage rates in this paragraph were not originally reported correctly; thanks to DLR for the correction.]

What’s the motivation for intimate partner violence? What’s the gain in child abuse? There really is none—at least, none that any normal person can comprehend. But when I clarify that the bottom right is where the horrible husbands, terrible wives, awful fathers, and abusive mothers live, I hope my readers no longer have any trouble with my calling them villains.

Unconscious Villainy

This is where things get interesting. The lack of clear motivation shown by emotional, dishonest abusers doesn’t say anything by itself. But it would be at least consistent with the idea that the spiders do not understand, realize, or fully admit even to themselves what they are like.

The evidence that spiders are unaware of their true nature is not as clear as the evidence for what that nature is. Vulnerable Narcissists, Borderline Personality cases, and other high-Emotionality villains are clearly horrible, and we can tell by looking at their observable behaviors. But thoughts? Beliefs? Their cognitive processes are just much more nebulous. How can you trust a habitually dishonest person to tell you about what it’s like to be a habitually dishonest person?

It’s not conclusive, but my evidence for their unconscious experience comes from three strands.

Strand 1: The Better to Deceive You With, My Dear

My favorite researcher here is still Tanya Reynolds. She finds,

[W]omen may not always be aware of their involvement in relational aggression (Reynolds, 2021). Women report being victimized by other women’s aggression, but deny their own perpetration against others (Arnocky & Vallaincourt, 2012; Tracy, 1991). In large examinations of relational aggression, women are found to be more relationally aggressive than men, but especially when relying on the reports of others, compared to self-reports (Archer, 2004). This disparity suggests observers more readily detect women’s relational aggression than do the female perpetrators themselves. Thus, relational aggression may not require consciously espoused malevolent motivations among perpetrators to damage victims’ social opportunities. For example, Reynolds (2018) found women’s professions of concern (e.g., “I am worried about her”) effectively transmit reputation-harming gossip about same-gender peers. Because such statements do not conform to narrow conceptualizations of gossip, they were not readily recognized as gossip and thus, less strongly penalized. However, these disclosures effectively harmed targets’ reputations, revealing that enacting reputational harm does not require perpetrators’ conscious intent.29

So, there’s at least the claim that, when women spread destructive gossip, they have no idea about ruining other people’s reputation. And the explanation is that they’re better optimized for reputational warfare by deluding themselves into consciously thinking their motives are benign.

I’ve long been skeptical that self-deception is particularly adaptive or normal for human beings. After all (I reasoned) I’m a human being, and whenever people suggest I might be deceiving myself, I always think seriously for a moment, ask others who know me well, and then feel confirmed that I’m not missing anything going on under the hood. Every example anyone ever raises always seems like “No, everybody agrees I’m not like that,” or “Of course I’m like that; who isn’t up front about that?”

But then, I’m pretty high in Honesty-Humility, and quite low on the Emotionality scale. I’ve always been very individualistic, in touch with my feelings, with a strong personal sense of self. And after all of this investigation, well, I’m discovering that I’m just not the kind of person who would be prone to self-deception for the sake of deceiving others. I don’t even think the typical person is prone to self-deception for the sake of deceiving others—I think villains are rare, and most of us share my difficulty in grasping what they’re like.

But people low in Honesty-Humility are deceptive, regardless of Emotionality; as shown by a robust body of evidence, including a very clever study using indirect questioning to reveal lies.3031 To the extent that Emotionality affects the frequency of lying, it appears to slightly increase it, if only in cases where subjects are trying to avoid punishment or protect others’ feelings.32

This gives us a confident starting point. We do know that the villains are all liars, so let’s start there, and draw the obvious conclusion: People who are highly deceptive would be naturally prone to self-deception according to the model that says self-deception evolved to help us successfully deceive others.33 (This is itself a contentious idea, and I don’t want to sweep counterarguments under the rug, but if you’re interested in exploring more deeply, the source I just cited is a great place to start reading.)

Psychopaths, Narcissists, and Machiavellians will lie for a while, but they often move on, particularly when their reputation makes it harder for them to continually prey on the same people in the same place over and over. Being free to roam around means getting a breather every once in a while. But if you’re going to lie within the context of a relationship that lasts for years or even decades, it’s going to be exhausting trying to keep two stories in your head all the time. Are the spiders really good at doing this? Or instead, do they just do that thing where they smooth over complexity, and forget about the story that they don’t need?

Strand 2: They Don’t Know Themselves

Having a strong identity and a clear sense of self not only makes it harder to lie. It makes it harder to act, for prolongued periods, as though you are someone you know you are not.

I’ve always said “personality is all the things about you that are non-negotiable.” That’s the kind of idea that people with clear, strong, well-developed personalities have about life. It’s also a narrow-minded notion, without any basis in the scientific literature, that completely fails to take into account the essence of the spiders. And when I think back, I knew them growing up—guys like V, who would state an opinion, hear my contrary opinion, completely reverse his opinion, and try to continue the discussion while I shook my head. His friends reported that V slept with numerous underage girls following this pattern: “Oh she was such an angel, I don’t know why she hurt me / you understand how I feel don’t you? You’re a sensitive girl / You’re such an angel / I can’t believe you would do this to me” Rinse and repeat, until he threatened to commit suicide. He never did kill himself; it was just a plea for attention—but the point is all the things were totally negotiable with V. He didn’t just play the chamelion around 15 year old girls, he did it around 18-year old guys.

And this is what the spiders are telling us: They don’t know themselves. They feel empty, emotionally and intellectually inconsistent, lacking in identity. Instead they focus on tangible aspects of themselves and objectify their physical bodies. This void in their personalities is their personality.

Elizabeth: A Case Study

To help give a sense of what a spider looks like, the end of I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me gaves a case study of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder, whom the authors called Elizabeth.34

They described Elizabeth as an attractive, witty twenty-eight-year-old woman presenting with depression. She’d married a man ten years older who had been her boss, and had recently given birth to her first child. But rather than feeling satisfied, she expressed discomfort at watching herself age, feeling envious of younger women’s beauty and ashamed of her own body. She was unsure of her intellect and uncomfortable with her feelings, which she described as “ugly.”

This was understandable, considering that she eventually admitted to nine extramarital affairs, which she initiated and ended largely on a whim, without enjoying sex. She admitted feeling excited at how puzzled her lovers seemed by her sudden interest, and then her equally sudden rejections. Although the authors never mentioned her expressing remorse or admitting this to her husband, her numerous affairs had consequences: the true father of her child was her parish priest.

Controlling others was valuable to Elizabeth. She spoke of using sex as a way of maintaining control in her relationships, and she gradually grew frustrated with her therapist, berating him, yelling at him, and complaining of him having control. When he maintained his calm she accused him of being cold and unfeeling, to no avail.

Growing up, she had many brothers, and as a child she pretended to be one of the boys, trying to fit in. Then she pretended affection for men. As her relationship with her husband deteriorated, she began fantasizing about submerging herself in the protection of a strong, handsome man who admired her without reserve: her teachers, her gynecologist, and eventually her therapist. And like many borderlines, she struggled with her sense of identity, saying, “I feel like I have a void in me that I can never quite fill.”

This poor sense of self, and a tendency to hide the self, are typical of borderlines and vulnerable Narcissists. Whether it’s caused by all the lies, or forms a motivation for all the lies I don’t really know, but is it really easy to make the claim that the spiders truly do know what they are doing and why even if they don’t know who they are themselves? I find it much easier to believe they bury, avoid, forget about, or even have absolutely no clue about their own motivations. When we look at what they do and the impact they have on others around them, they don’t just tell a few lies; they pull others around them into a kind of false world. It isn’t only they themselves who describe avoiding or not understanding the reality of who they are; the victims of vulnerable Narcissists say things like,

He would tell me what the reality was and he justified it so well and he was so convinced in his arguments that I would sort of accept his reality as my own... I felt like I was part of his reality to the point where I didn’t even have my own thoughts anymore.35

But why are they even lying, though? What’s the reason for it all?

Strand 3: The Missing Motives

Karl Jung once said that “If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation.” This isn’t great science, and it isn’t even very easy to do, given that there are a dozen consequences to the things the spiders do. Their devastated marriages and traumatised children likely don’t make them very happy, so, is being miserable their motive? They seem willing to sacrifice their time and risk punishment in order to harm others, so maybe they hate their spouses, friends, and children so much they are glad to hurt them even at cost to themselves? They seem doomed to scurry around in webs of deceit and constantly bicker with everyone around them, so lying and bickering is somehow an end in itself?

This doesn’t go anywhere—and we don’t have to make up stories like this anyway. When we want to know what someone is experiencing, a quick psychometric battery is remarkably effective because it’s impossible for the people taking it to know what “normal” or “average” is. Indeed, people presume that what they are like is the way everyone is, more or less,36 and this tends to inspire a bit of sincerity about oneself, even if only accidental. Presumably no one is going to say, “I am an abusive spider,” but they will—statistically—describe themselves in ways that are more spidery than others do.

So, lets look at those descriptions. What do they tell us?

People in the bottom right have trouble with relationships. Yet unlike the serpents at the bottom left who treat other people as disposable, the spiders crave connections. If we look at the terms used by both they themselves and by other people to describe them, they’re clingy, but defensive and oversensitive; dependent, but negative and complaining; insecure, but petty. Their lives are filled with problems, and they’re entitled to having their smallest and most inconsequential whims met, but they’re spineless and cowardly, so they look around for people on the other side of the map who have the courage, resourcefulness, and confidence to solve their problems for them.

They show enough weakness, sensitivity, and vulnerability to encourage you to care for them, to garner sympathy, and pull you into a relationship. Unfortunately, if they let the true extent of their basic awfulness be known, their pretenses would fail utterly. But so long as they can keep the focus on what that horrible person did to them, they’ll be fine—until that horrible person becomes you, at which point they may smoothly switch to someone else who can solve their problems for them.

Worse, many of them have learned that the respect and opinion of others can be like a drug. Vanity, materialism, snobbishness, and envy fill them with a driving need for status. They must have it, therefore they deserve it; they deserve it, therefore they are worthy of it; they are worthy of it, and therefore you must give it to them, and once they draw this conclusion they are ready to wreck, ruin, and destroy the lives of everyone they love.

And they are filled with love:

What you’re seeing here is a set of correlations between grandiose Narcissism (measured by the NPI), vulnerable Narcissism (measured by the NI-R), and a variety of attachment and love styles found in a 2012 study.37 According to that study, vulnerable Narcissists are found to anxiously attached, with an interdependent sense of self that depends on others around them for identity. And they experience elevated levels of multiple love styles, described by the authors as:

Eros (e.g., ‘‘My lover fits my ideal standards of physical beauty/handsomeness’’), Ludus (e.g., ‘‘I have sometimes had to keep two of my lovers from finding out about each other’’), Pragma (e.g., ‘‘I try to plan my life carefully before choosing a lover’’)… Mania (e.g., ‘‘When my lover doesn’t pay attention to me, I feel sick all over’’), and Agape (e.g., ‘‘I would rather suffer myself than let my lover suffer’’).

The sample size for this study was small (n = 92), but I was able to find a larger Serbian study with 347 participants that told a similar story—the greater a person’s Nacrissistic vulnerability, the greater their feelings of love:38

Although game-playing love called ludus is seen in all forms of Narcissism, notice the strongest relationship in this study, as in the previous study, is the relationship with mania, a possessive, desperate feeling measured by statements like “I cannot relax if I suspect my lover is with someone else” and “If my lover ignores me for a while, I sometimes do stupid things to get his/her attention back.” Unsurprisingly, a quick check reveals the same pattern of elevated ludus and mania is seen in Borderline Personality Disorder.39

In fact, this preoccupation with ludic and manic love isn’t merely a manifestation of Narcissism, or Borderline Personality Disorder, but of the entire high-Emotionality, low-Honesty-Humility space, seen with obsessive and game-playing behaviours like calling to make sure one’s partner is where he or she claimed to be going, or talking to a partner’s romantic rivals to make the partner jealous—both kinds of behaviors correlating negatively with Honesty-Humility and positively with Emotionality.40

To some people, this is what it means to love: to control, to abuse, to neglect, to discard, and to draw back the people they care about, however their hearts desire.

They Care About You

In this post I’ve tried my best to explain what happens when empathy and emotion are paired with a lack of morality. The consequences are less shocking than the conventional crimes of murder, drug trafficking, or fraud that dot the headlines, but they are far more frequent, and arguably far worse, because they manifest as the abuse of spouses and children.

Although women are more prone than men to this psychological profile, most women seldom manifest the associated traits and behaviors, and very few are genuine spiders whose entire identity is a hungry void that uses entitlement and a sense of victimisation to justify abusing those they love.

And if the study results we’ve been looking at are accurate, then more than anyone else, the spiders definitely experience love—a fickle, hypersensitive, overpowering love that demands and commands. Whether they merely toy with others for a short time, diffidently push away and pull back, or cling desperately without ever letting go, their hearts demand attention, acknowledgement, and continual recognition from those they care about. The best you can hope for is that they never care about you at all, because even though love may be generous and ennobling for most people, some of us express our love differently.

Because I’d rather offer something interesting online than complain, I mostly kept things positive. I wrote about how Most Couples are Happy, which is statistically true, though the example of my own happiness I gave was getting away and walking through the rain. As the situation worsened, and the months stretched on and on, I began to lose the sense of what emotional richness felt like, and tried to remind myself with The Flavors of Emotion. The kids were affected too. I could tell problems had been going on for so long that my personality was changing; and while I knew wasting my life was not normal, ultimately I couldn’t do the things I really wanted to do anymore—there was nothing I could do except soldier on, keep going to work, keep holding the family up, and hope that even if I’d given up on the idea of tomorrow, or next week, or even next month, then maybe, just maybe, next year might be different, even though there was no reason to imagine it would be.

I’d resolved every issue I could resolve, dealt with every situation that could be dealt with. But the problem, ultimately, boiled down to a person—a single person who, more than anyone else I know, had made me and my entire family absolutely miserable.

Who Was It?

I’ll tell you; it won’t really be a surprise. But I don’t want to simply complain. As always, I want to be able to offer something meaningful and useful to my readers, so I want to focus not on this one person but on you, on everyone whose lives have been damaged—or in some cases, completely destroyed—by all those people, everywhere, who damage and destroy lives.

What I want to talk about is, who are those people? How can we identify them? And, what should we do about them?

As a society, we’re obsessed with the maladjusted behaviors of dishonest men. We have a rich vocabulary to describe them: Psychopaths, sadists, Narcissists, bullies, predators, abusers. We’ve built an enormous criminal justice system to deal with the bad boys who don’t play well with others. Our educational system makes every effort to train them away from these behaviors when they’re young. But this doesn’t satisfy America, which continues to roil with arguments regarding rehabilitating, sentencing, and policing criminals, or the degree to which private citizens can and should protect themselves with firearms. When we think of villains, evildoers, and threats to Our Democracy, really, we’re always thinking of men.

This is a mistake.

It’s obvious that a very small percentage of men really are genuinely responsible for disproportionate levels of misery we experience in our day-to-day lives. I’m not trying to sweep this under the rug; read the news on any given day and you’ll see the problems caused by calloused, violent individuals can be devastating.

But there’s another segment of the population responsible for behaviors that are individually less awful, yet far more common. Every once in a while someone points this out, but it’s usually only in a comedic setting, in a way that minimizes the impact:

Before now, there was no map I could show you. And there were really no graphs to describe the petty dramas, pointless gossip, and banal acts of sabotage that go on day by day to destroy as many friendships and tear apart as many families as all the violent and criminal acts combined. But just as it goes without saying that violent criminals are overwelmingly men and boys, when we talk about nonviolent dysfunction, we’re talking largely about the behaviors of women and girls.

Others go on and on about this kind of thing, though largely from an idealistic desire to “go back to the 50s,” or from a misogynistic redpilled worldview that paints all women with a broad brush. I can sympathize with people who’ve suffered unduly because of horrible women, because, well, I am somebody who‘s suffered unduly because of horrible women, but musing about how awful all women are is no more useful than bitter misandrists insisting “yes, all men.” It isn’t true.

And since it isn’t true, sensible people generally push past this kind of dichotomous thinking. Eventually, many redpilled men realize that they can’t just blame everything on AWALT;1 over time, many radical feminists realize they can’t accurately dismiss “the majority of men as dangerous misogynists.” Unfortunately, that’s where they seem to stop. Some men, some women, the end.

OK, yes, not all men. OK, not all women. But why not all men? Why not all women? Which people cause so many problems for everybody?

Making A Map

There’s a lot of research out there we could look at, but if we’re interested in the different (and similar) ways men and women behave badly, the traits we’re really interested in are Emotionality, and Honesty-Humility.2 Although women do score marginally higher than men on Honesty-Humility,3 we know Emotionality is the major dimension differentiating women from men. People low in Emotionality (E) describe themselves as masculine, fearless, rugged, and insensitive, while people on the high side are sentimental, nervous, melodramatic, and clingy, so it’s not surprising we see a gender difference. Honesty-Humility (H) is predictably measured by terms like honest, honorable, and humble, versus sly, greedy, and amoral.

When we look at numerous behaviors in terms of these two personality traits, this is the picture emerging from psychological research:4

So take a moment to look over this graph. Considering it all together, this paints a broad picture of the spectrum of human social behavior associated with men (toward the left) and women (toward the right). Please do consider whether you think I’m leaving things out—selective reporting can obviously create a biased picture, and while I spent hours working on this to be confident I’m presenting a fair and complete map of what the research has shown, let me know in the comments if you think I’m leaving anything out, or suspect the position of some trait might be off.

However we might wonder about individual traits, the overall picture looks clear to me. The first thing that jumps out for me is the dysfunction and misery caused by the lower end of the graph. There’s not much good there.

But look a bit harder, and you might notice a few exceptions to the rule that says everything low in H is bad and everything high in H is good. Check the upper right quadrant and you’ll find extrinsic religiosity, which is basically the kind of performative, socially motivated Sunday Christianity they warned you about in the Bible:

Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven… And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6

People high in Emotionality are extremely concerned with what other people think. I’ve written before about the concept of Face, which isn’t merely a feature of Eastern culture; those high in Emotionality are sensitive and fearful enough that they can’t always handle the truth, or letting others know the truth about them; notice the position of Pretentiousness and Vulnerable Narcissism on the lower right.

Obviously there’s a lot of jargon here, but Vulnerable Narcissism is that special kind of Narcissism that emerges when a person knows they’re important, and knows they’re special, but needs the constant adoration of others to assuage gnawing fears about their actual worthlessness. Meanwhile Pretentiousness is basically what Shirley Manson was singing about with Stupid Girl: “A million lies to sell yourself is all you ever had.”

Compare this to Rationality, or even better, to the Social Courage which lets people point out when the emperor has no clothes. This is one of the most important virtues I can imagine, and it’s barely correlated with Honesty-Humility at all; being brave enough to do things for others that need to be done even if it risks your reputation is almost impossible if you deeply feel the emotions of others through Affective Empathy.

And you can even travel downward on the low-emotionality side to find some really valuable things. I’m thinking specifically of the realistic professions on the lower left, for example—they’re the reason why any of us have, well, anything. Farmers, plumbers, repairmen, construction workers, mechanics, these are the guys who generate real, tangible wealth. A simple thought experiment should prove you already realize how important these guys are: Imagine they all died overnight, and then think about how long the rest of us would last without them.

Meanwhile, the social professions like therapists, teachers, and particularly human resources personnel at the upper right corner take a lot of flak, and for good reason. For example, I do think therapy works, but my attempts to track down the source for the popular claim that “50% of people show noticeable improvement after 8 therapy sessions, while 75% improve after 20 sessions” returned a study finding that, well:

[N]o clear differences are found between 8 or 16 sessions of psychotherapy – both combined with pharmacotherapy – with regard to severity of depression and social functioning… Although progression has been made in treating depression in the past two decades, the number of patients who experience one or more recurrences is still high with percentages between 50% and 85%5

I’m just looking at depression here, where a meta analysis reports that high quality studies on therapy return an effect size of d = 0.22, which is small.6 But if that doesn’t make you very happy, well, maybe this little article will bring a smile: “How to prove that your therapy is effective, even when it is not,” promises that “Several methods are available to help you show that your therapy is effective, even when it is not.”7

What about teachers? I disagree with the general thrust of many Substackers who suggest that school is unnatural or should be abolished entirely, but by the same token, it’s extremely hard to look at findings like the way “The average American parent’s science and math knowledge taps out around the sixth-grade level” and not suspect that our educational program is overly ambitious. My oldest child is pretty confident about being depressed, and pretty confident school made it worse from the teachers giving out too much work, and well, maybe the new therapy we could try involves less school for everybody.

And before you tell me this is just tongue-in-cheek, a similar thought experiment should prove you’re already ambivalent about the effectiveness of therapists, teachers, and HR employees: Imagine they all died overnight, and then think about how long the rest of us would last without them. Something tells me we’d make out all right.

Evaluating the impact of Emotionality & Honesty Humility

The above provides an informal discussion. But to try to be a bit more rigorous about what I want to say, I looked for a specific framework to help decide whether any of these things were good or bad. To do this, I settled on this question:

“What would a more-or-less regular person want most other people to be like?”

I included the caveat about being basically a regular person because an unusual person is going to interact strangely with some of these things. For instance, if I were very emotional, I’d probably have trouble being friends with a bunch of rationalists who constantly insist on talking through the minutae of abstruse scientific or philosophical issues. If I were a disabled homeless person, I’d be acutely interested in the overall sympathy of others around. If I were an aggressive atheist, I’d be pretty isolated by people who were strongly religious. But if my situation were sort of unremarkable, and my personality and other characteristics were near enough to the general human average, what then? What would I want to see in other people around me?

There’s definitely room to argue about the red and blue I added to the diagram above. Even assuming you agree with the methodology, I can’t prove those are the positive and negative traits on the map. If you’d box different traits in blue, maybe I’m just unduly influenced by my own foibles, so let me know in the comments if you disagree.

But I will tell you that having other people around with those traits I’ve boxed in blue has always been good for me. Time and time again I’ve depended on contractors to help me build and fix things, resilient and rational coworkers, trustworthy and cooperative romantic partners, and sympathetic friends and family.

And if you want to try to defend the underside of the map, you’re going to be in for an uphill battle. Sure, looking at that big area casually circled in red might give the impression that I didn’t really think each and every part of that area out. Maybe you don’t see what’s such a big deal about gambling8 or dichotomous thinking;910 or maybe, like most people, you have no idea what Borderline Personality Disorder is, or why it’s so bad:

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a complex but frequently misunderstood condition that affects millions of people worldwide. It is characterized by symptoms such as a fear of abandonment, intense emotional instability, and difficulty maintaining relationships. It can have a profound effect on both individuals and the people around them…

The main primer for laymen on Borderline personality disorder (again, BPD) is a book by Kreisman & Straus aptly titled I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me, which opens with a case study on a woman called Jennifer.11 In her younger years, Jennifer sabotaged her relationships by stirring up conflict. Once she was married to a wealthy and successful husband, she started fights to keep him from leaving the house, and sometimes provoked him into striking her before inviting him to have sex. Eventually, she was having an affair with a man more than twice her age. The authors described Jennifer as an intelligent woman who knew she had serious problems, but couldn’t do anything about her behavior.

If this sounds dreadful—the kind of condition that makes life for you and your loved ones unlivable—the natural question to ask is “OK, but how common is it?” While prevalence rates of psychological disorders can be a bit fuzzy depending on how they’re measured, it may help to compare BPD with psychopathy, which has a prevalence of somewhere between 1.5% (measured strictly) and 4.5% (measured loosely).12 In contrast, I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me gives the prevalence of BPD near 6%; this is probably a bit high, but I did find a Dutch study reporting 5% of the population has at least 3 symptoms,13 and another study claiming a lifetime prevalence near 9% in university samples.14

Everything in the lower right corner is like this. I find no mention of any functional, positive traits there. The lower left corner will beat you up and take your wallet; the lower right corner won’t do anything at all, until you’re in a relationship with them. But once you’re there—oh, once you’re there! They’ll scream at you, accuse you of all kinds of cruel and unfeeling intentions, ruin your reputation, start arguments with you for attention, attempt suicide for attention, manipulate you for sympathy or compliments or support, frustrate any attempt to find a peaceful modus vivendi, and grind away your sanity day by day. The lower left corner threatens your life; the lower right corner makes you wish you had never been born. The lower left corner stabs you in the back (or the face) and leaves, but the further to the right you go, the higher the chance is that they won’t even let you leave.

It doesn’t matter where in that big, red, circled area we’re talking about. Pick a term there and read up on it, or just think back over the people who’ve caused you grief. Maybe your experiences are different from mine, but over and over again I’ve suffered from the exploitive and manipulative behaviors of others. Whether it’s criminality, mental disorders, or relationship problems, I’ve had to deal with it.

Story Time: Life in the Big City

• Living in the big city, one of my cars was stolen. I thought I hadn’t been locking the door, so after that, I was careful to lock up. Then the car was stolen a second time. After that I bought The Club to lock the steering wheel. Then the car was stolen a third time, and I thought, “Sheesh, I still didn’t take this seriously enough to be using the club consistently? I should’ve remembered!” But after a few weeks the police found the car, with The Club intact inside. I really had remembered to use it, but the thieves had just shrugged and cut through the steering wheel.

• Living in the big city, one of my relatives went insane, but—because of budgetary problems with the state government—could never be kept at the local mental hospital. The police were regular visitors, and frequently hauled my crazy relative away for a few days of peace while the crazy person was “stabilized” and returned. But you learn to make do: My strategy was sleeping with ear plugs behind a locked and barricaded door to keep out this crazy relative yelling about breaking in and killing me in the night. (The moral of the story is, everything I really needed to know in life I would eventually put to use in Project Zomboid)

• Living in the big city, one of my girlfriends was a neverending source of drama. It wasn’t that she did drugs so much as the way my friends reacted when she talked about how much drugs she’d done. It wasn’t that she ran over wild animals in the road so much as the way her own friends reacted to her speeding up on the approach. It wasn’t that she threw tantrums—well no, wait. It was the tantrums, and the way she’d flip me off, and hit me, and then, when I’d get the message and avoid the living daylights out of her, she’d throw herself all over me again. We were young, and I do sincerely believe she outgrew a lot of this, but the last I heard her first marriage had ended in divorce.

Over the years a person has a lot of time to reflect on things that went wrong. Why was my last boss so very, very awful? Well, it didn’t help that a snarly employee was constantly gossiping about each of us to the other—I was smart enough to ignore her, but my boss wasn’t. Why did our supposed friend pocket the $1500 we lent him to see him through a month he was in between jobs? Well, it’s hard to think he was very good at “active cooperation.” Why did that guy I know end up cheating on his spouse and ruining his marriage? Well, risky sexual behavior goes with the territory. And why has my family been so totally, abjectly miserable for the last two years? Because of Mrs. Pie’s Mother!

Sometimes your mother-in-law really is bad

Two years ago, as we were rennovating our house, our family spent a lot of time with the in-laws. Whenever they would go over to visit, my children would tell me that Mrs. Pie’s mother was loud. They’d say this woman, whom I’ll call E, was mean. They’d report that E was pretty awful to her own husband. And they complained that they didn’t want to be around her. But whenever my children said that, I would answer, “She’s much better than she used to be.” And in many ways, she was.

Back in the days when Mrs. Pie was just Miss Right, her mother E had been horrible to her. She’d yell at Miss Right in front of her friends, chew her out for failing to get straight A’s, and spread embarassing information out of spite. Once young Miss Right tried to escape her histrionics out the bedroom window; E dragged her back inside.

For a while, E’s marriage deteriorated. She started having affairs, getting depressed, and worrying about whether she was going crazy. She would take her daughter with her on long drives which rapidly devolved into long counselling sessions. And E was very, very clear about establishing that the mother-daughter bond was sacred and should never be broken, because nothing is more important than family.

When I met E myself, I was appalled. This was a grown woman who didn’t know how to behave in public—or, as I was soon to discover, in private, when she sat me down after hours of histrionic and inappropriate behavor at a restaurant to chew me out for being a deadbeat who was unworthy of marrying her daughter. I was working, and completing my degree in physics, but I held my peace as she went on and on, before asking me what I had to say for myself. I told her I had nothing to say, and I left.

It was a warm autumn night. Dried leaves blew through the gutters, and the summer triangle was visible above the rooftops, high in the western sky. During the long ramble I took that evening through the suburbs, the significance of what I had witnessed gradually became undeniable: This woman was about to become my mother-in-law. The only way to avoid it would be to break off the engagement, say goodbye to the woman who wanted to marry me, and try to find someone else to start over with.

I don’t know what you’d have done. But by that time I was in my mid twenties. I’d already had an informal long distance engagement that didn’t work out, and I’d already politely disengaged from a number of attractive young women who threw too many red flags talking about their anxiety medication, their devotion to wokeness, or their struggles with math or science. After eight years searching for Miss Right, I wasn’t going to abandon her because her mother was awful. So we married, and Miss Right became Mrs. Apple Pie.

Over the years I’d been firm and set boundaries, and E avoided spending much time at our place. But Mrs. Pie would take the children over for extended visits on the holidays, or while I was working. I’d hear secondhand about how E continued yelling, pushing everybody around, and occasionally hitting Mrs. Pie.

But the last straw seemingly came a few years ago. This was after she’d had a particularly nasty argument with us towards the end of a visit to the place our family was staying. Both Mrs. Pie and I had left the living room, expecting E would depart with her husband.15 But E insisted Child #1 leave with her. Child #1 refused. E demanded Child #1 stop being defiant and get in the car with E and her husband. Child #1 refused.

E renewed her demand, and so far as I was concerned, that was it. We weren’t about to allow E to take our children without our permission and against their will, and we returned to the room to say as much.

Oh, but we had misheard! (Child #1 inisted we hadn’t misheard.) Oh, but no one was trying to take precious Child #1 against their will! (Child #1 clarified this was a lie.) Tears and protestations ensued. It was all a mistake! Didn’t I understand that? Why was I being so vindictive? What about Mrs. Pie? (Mrs. Pie was right there, she made no objections.)

But over time, as months passed and we’d broken off contant, Mrs. Pie began to raise objections. E was heartbroken. E was contrite. And E was her mother.

I didn’t quite grasp the significance of the M-word, because my own parents hadn’t been great, and showed limited interest in maintaining contact with me after I grew up. But Mrs. Pie insisted E had admitted she was wrong, and had agreed to make changes and stop berating her husband in front of our own children. Mrs. Pie was adamant that they set a good example for what a marriage look like, and E had agreed.

So the visits resumed. It was around this time we moved across the country to the Northeastern United States. We were alone there for a couple of years, but eventually the in-laws followed, moving into a house within walking distance so they could see their grandchildren every day. I still harbored resentment towards E, but I assumed this was a pretty normal result of our general dissimilarity and the strained relationships that have always existed between son-in-laws and mother-in-laws. I’d read Aboriginal Australians even practiced strict avoidance customs greatly limiting the language they could use with one another or preventing them from even seeing each other, and largely kept out of the way.

But after E moved to within a few blocks of our house, Mrs. Pie gradually went strange. And the way she treated me changed: She became grouchy, suspicious, and argumentative—not manipulative, demonstrative, or dramatic, but generally uncooperative. I put it down to morning sickness, scares involving the health of child #6, and then to her hurting herself after a fall. She began feeling increasingly exhausted and asked me to be the one to walk the kids to the grandparents, or pick up and drop off the grandparents for their frequent visits. I agreed, and I managed to be quite civil as well, but gradually, petty arguments began to take over our entire relationship, and nothing really got better.

And at first, even when the older children began talking about how awful it was when their grandparents were around and begging not to see them, I’d say “OK, but look, she’s much better than she used to be.” Gradually I agreed to stick my nose into matters, and I verified E wasn’t only being loud and pushy, she really had returned to her habit of constantly belittling grandpa in front of the kids, and I tried to talk to her about it. The immediate result was a lot more yelling and recriminations, but that wasn’t the entirety of the problem.

The real problem was that Mrs. Pie felt the same way that all of us did, but she couldn’t admit it to herself, and she had absolutely no idea what to do about it. Although there are a lot of unpleasant people I’ve known, E is the most obnoxious, intolerable person I’ve ever met. As I was researching for this article, I read some of Kreisman & Straus’ I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me to Mrs. Pie, and she immediately made connections with her mother. The jury is out as to whether E really qualifies as having BPD, but the point is who cares if she has BPD, because she lives in the lower-right corner, where dichotomous thinking, mate guarding, malicious gossip, and the ensuing relationship problems will ruin your entire family.

From Mrs. Apple Pie’s perspective, this created an impossible moral dilemma. She had to stay with her mother. Contemplating cutting E off entirely was unthinkable. But she could see what E was doing to her children, and to me. Much, much harder was admitting that she herself couldn’t stand to be around her. Mrs. Pie frequently talked about how she saw E like a dysfunctional daughter who needed her help. And she was obligated to provide this help, because she was quite sure that nothing is more important than family, and E had worked very, very hard over a long, long time to make it absolutely, crystal clear that morally speaking, family doesn’t mean your husband, family doesn’t mean you, and family doesn’t mean your children. “Family” means “E.”

Conclusion

Morality is extremely important. The clearest argument I am aware of to support this is the understanding of what it looks like for people without morality, who live in the red. But having a moral center doesn’t, by itself, solve questions about what morality is.

I’m not going to tell you what morality is, but I will tell you that when you think of bad people that you need to be on your guard against, don’t just look to the unemotional, masculine lower left. We have an entire crimial justice system to deal with them—and if that fails, then door locks and security cameras can solve a lot of problems.16 But so far, we are largely helpless against the depredations of the emotional, feminine lower right. The police can’t make your spouse stop monopolizing your attention to keep you away from other women, you can’t put your sister in jail for ruining your reputation, the courts won’t make your anorexic, hyperventallating, cigarette-stealing daughter stop telling social services what terrible parents you are, and firearms won’t protect you from a selfish, dysfunctional mother who needs you to be there for her forever and ever.

So far, the best I can do is tell you what this looks like, and warn you as strenuously as I can to reject a malevolent, emotional person’s attempts to attack, manipulate, or draw you into their drama—and if you can, to give up, get away, break contact, and steer clear completely.

This probably would be remarkable in a girl, but anyone whose had sons probably knows that boys are perennially drawn to horror. I’m told that Lovecraft is inappropriate for children, but that’s the boys’ bedtime story on most nights.1 Although there are some suggestions that more imaginative2 and disagreeable3 people like horror, after reviewing the literature the most robust finding of psychological science is that horror is really for boys:

Gender, educational level, and age are also correlated with horror liking and frequency of use (males show higher liking and more frequent use, whereas liking and use frequency are negatively correlated with educational level and age). People with stronger beliefs in the paranormal tend to seek out horror media with supernatural content, whereas those with weaker beliefs in the paranormal gravitate toward horror media with natural content, suggesting that people seek out horror media with threatening stimuli that they perceive to be plausible. While frightening media may be initially aversive, people high in sensation seeking and intellect/imagination, in particular, like intellectual stimulation and challenge and expect not just negative but also positive emotions from horror consumption. They brave the initially aversive response to simulate threats and so enter a positive feedback loop by which they attain adaptive mastery through coping with virtual simulated danger.4

I don’t know about you, but this rings true for me: a lot of what is fun about horror is that sense of testing personal boundaries, like eating strange or extremely spicy food, or seeing how long you can stand barefoot in the snow before running inside. Granted, the classic, 8-bit games are pretty tame compared to what’s out there, but if you grew up with a NES or have younger boys at home, you could do worse this Halloween than to give Castlevania Shadows a try:

OK so how do I play this game?

The ROM can be downloaded from this link. You’ll need an emulator to play the ROM, but these are available here for various operating systems. Obviously Windows is better supported for gaming than other operating systems, but I’m playing this on a Mac and it runs fine.

I still use modes; listening to this piece I made in Aeolean, you can tell I liked the Splatterhouse series when it came out.1 (You can edit this song for yourself; in case you get stuck listening to it over and over, drag the purple slider to the end and then stop it. Or, you know. Try it over and over in D# the way its creator does.)

But the subject of scales is much broader than this. If you’re willing to leave the familiar realm of ordinary scales behind completely, and divide an “octave” up into 5, 7, 19, or 31 notes, you’ll find you’ve entered the bizarre new world of xenharmonic music.

Macrotonal Xenharmonic Scales

The idea of music made using, say, a scale of 9 equal divisions of the octave (9 EDO) is very interesting, but how does it sound? Well unfortunately—and don’t take this the wrong way if you’re a composer in the macrotonal world, but unfortunately—many of these scales will make a person’s ears bleed:2

There’s a clue to be found by wading through the above, though: All the notes in scales dividing the octave into 2, 3, 4, and 6 equal divisions already exist in a regular scale, and don’t really provide any new options. Then 8 through 11 are terrible, with 11 sounding particularly stupid. But dividing an octave into 5 notes, or 7 notes, creates strange new sounds that almost work. The reason for this is that these are prime numbers far from 12, and some of the notes approximate a 12-note just intonation:

Even the usual 12 equal divisions of an octave—that is, 12 EDO—doesn’t perfectly match doesn’t perfectly match just intonation. We use it because an instrument has to be tuned to a specific key in just intonation, and then it won’t work for other keys.3 If you’re not familiar with tuning, I’ll try to sum it up by saying that sound is all about vibration. The plucking of a single string actually produces a multitude of subtle harmonics along pure fractional ratios. These fractional ratios are what make up the different notes in a scale tuned according to just intonation, and aren’t evenly spaced, so even 12 EDO doesn’t hit all the notes in a way that perfectly matches the harmonics. But how well do xenharmonic scales match just intonation? To give a sense of how accurately these different scales reproduce familiar music, I compared their frequencies to the regular 12 EDO:

The typical distance between half-steps in just intonation is around 6%, so the “G” from 5 EDO really splits F# and G, and the B sounds odd in both 5 EDO and 7 EDO—enough that those are notes that would ordinarily sound far out of tune in a conventional context.

For all this, however, you can definitely make music with these xenharmonic scales. Although I do like the 12 EDO original better, Olivia Jageurs did a very good job with Matthew Sheeran’s Lyres of Ur in 7 EDO. Unsurprisingly though, songs are better if they’re composed in these xenharmonic scales to begin with, and Amano Hideya’s Like Japanese Curry is a very good example of 5 EDO music, with a kind of amelodic feel:

These songs aren’t wonderful, but they do at least have musical merit. The main problem with macrotonal scales is that the limited number of notes creates a very restricted auditory palette. This is why things don’t get really interesting until you start looking at microtonal xenharmonic scales that divide up an octave into more than 12 notes.

Microtonal Xenharmonic Scales

Mathematically we could divide an octave into any number of notes, like 50, or 300, or 21.991 (that’s about 9 π), but they aren’t likely to sound good, or even produce tones that we can tell apart. Are there really any microtonal scales that can do a better job than the classic 12 EDO, though? Well predictably 13 EDO is awful, and 16 through 18 are not great. But then we find 19—another prime number that avoids being too close to any multiple of 12—gives us a very exotic sound without being musically confining.

It requires a bit of nuance to make music that takes advantage of the additional notes in EDO 19 without descending into a cacophanous mess (like this rendition of Carol of the Bells). Nevertheless, it can definitely be done—Exhibit A here is Cat Logic, by Stevie Boyes:

Because it divides the octave up so finely, 19 EDO produces notes close enough to a regular scale that it can still be used to make ordinary music, like Love Shines Through - Stevie Boyes, Dove - Antihoney, Anthems for a Seventeen Year‐Old Girl - Broken Social Scene, or the baseline to Metallica’s Enter Sandman. This is why 19 EDO has been called “the stealth microtonal tuning.” The most dissonant note is D#, which does end up a bit high in pitch, but in general the 19 notes in 19 EDO actually reproduce the 12 notes of just intonation slightly better than the usual 12 EDO:

Notice, however, that just having many divisions doesn’t guarantee a good match for the classical scale. 17 EDO is slightly shifted so that, as shown in orange above, most of its notes lie in between the classic notes. The resultant scale gives rise to pieces like the aptly named Ephemeral Happiness—if you give it a listen, you’ll find happiness lasts for only 24.8 seconds in 17 EDO.

Once you train your ear a bit with 19 EDO, though, you can appreciate stranger songs like Lagoon, Diester’s Saccarine Song, or The Future is No Longer Accessible. Although there’s very little out there that’s been written in 19 EDO, the seven additional notes allow for sub- and super-major chords, as well as another option in between perfect and diminished fifths, and even an extra note nestled just below the tonic. The most obvious ways I can think of to make use of these additional notes would be with trills, or by swapping out adjacent notes in repetitive arpeggios, but really broadening into the space would require chord progressions that are wholly absent from classical music. You can probably tell I’m captivated by this scale—I actually find that the 19 EDO Carol of Bells I mentioned above gives me chills at this point. (On the other hand, that may just go to show that I’m pathalogically high in Openness and fried out my musical palette with xenharmonic music, IDK.4)

And then there are even more finely divided microtonal scales, like 31 EDO.

Most xenharmonic scales don’t work very well because few of the notes match just intonation. But the more divisions you have, the more options there are, and 31 EDO is another xenharmonic scale that divides the octave into equal parts using a prime number far from a multiple of 12.

31 EDO gets a lot of love from the musical community. Chances are, if you want to find microtonal music in other scales your search results are going to be innundated with 31 EDO songs.

Unfortunately, I really think the granularity of 31 EDO is excessive—and making good use of the additional notes does indeed appear to be harder here than in 19 EDO. You should probably browse around for yourselves and see what you think, but frankly there’s a lot of music written in 31 EDO that I suspect exists primarily as a vehicle for intellectuals to impress one another by ignoring how random, meandering or miserable it sounds.

Yet good music can definitely be composed and played in EDO 31. Here’s You’re Everything, by Vogelgeorg:

And although the more typical 31 EDO music does tend to meander, I definitely enjoyed Glitterdance, by Zhea Erose, and Mike Battaglia’s 31 EDO rendition of Scarborough Fair.

I think it says something about the kind of person who’s drawn to these odd scales that there’s so much light xenharmonic jazz. Jazz itself has always tended to push against the limitations of a classical 12 EDO scale, and while personality correlations with music preferences are quite weak,5 we do find from a massive study of over 5000 Spotify users that jazz is slightly more preferred by Conscientious, Agreeable, Open people,6 so this is kind of what there is so far—a bunch of xenharmonic music that would appeal to the cast of Star Trek, The Next Generation.

To me, though, most of the music that currently exists in this sphere comes across as either awful, or else, dry and unmemorable because of how little structure or pattern there is to be found. And this is really striking to me, because this isn’t what I expected at all when I first found out about xenharmonic music.

Doesn’t the term xenharmonicity itself evoke the strange and unsettling? I think musicians have been slow to appreciate the opportunity to create weird, frightening, and angry music using the dissonance available in xenharmonic scales. I realize most of my readers may not have heard of xenharmonicity, and so presumably most musicians are in the dark, too. But this stuff is not new. It’s been around since Chalmers wrote about 19 EDO in the 1961 edition of Current Musicology.7 Before that, Joseph Yasser promoted 19 EDO in his 1932 Theory of Evolving Tonality.8 And before that, Guillaume Costeley used it in the 16th century to compose his Seigneur Dieu ta pitié:

So all right, what about after that? After all of these centuries of theory and experimentation, where have xenharmonic scales gone? Well, so far as I can determine, it’s mostly been a bunch of jazz musicians using it to make a bunch of music that, you know, sounds like jazz.

But I’m not interested in xenharmonic scales because I like jazz. I’m interested in xenharmonic scales because I think they have potential for darker genres. I love the chilling synthwave remixes Luminist composed for the Metroid Theme and Kraid’s Lair; how would those have sounded in 19 EDO? Sure, we do have great Arab Metal that makes use of quarter-note tuning on the Oud. But why so little beyod this? It’s like metalheads just discovered Phrygian (or maybe, ooh, Phrygian dominant) and called it a day. The fact that there isn’t yet much good xenharmonic metal suggests there’s an opening here. I’m no good with guitars, so I’m not really going to be the one to exploit this opportunity, but guys, seriously listen!

This is

how metal

can

sound.

Most people try to determine how these differences play out by having a few conversations, listening to gossip, and building experience over time. Alternatively, they look for a shortcut and read some heavily publicized work like…

• Sex at Dawn, which says everyone is basically polyamorous,2 or

• Sex at Dusk, a lengthy expose of Sex at Dawn’s shoddy scholarship3, or

• Tell Me What You Want,4 which does a good job of talking about what most people want, but not a great job discussing variation (for example, it misses significant variation in male romantic interest), or

• What Do Women Want? which is a wonderfully written collection of anecdotes, reviews, and digressions into Freudianism that might electrify Tove, but leaves the more skeptical among us feeling it may just be slightly short on actual science.5

So as always, I took the third route, which was to beg people to answer embarassing personal questions carry out a survey and submit it to principal component analysis. This is the very the best tool I am aware of for understanding the entire space of variation, because it presents that variation exactly as it is, without any distortion.

As with the post about what we desire in a woman, I checked my data for non-serious responses before carrying out the principal component analysis. I extracted five factors, checked their relationships to personality traits and political values, and got to work representing these with AI generated images.

This time, however, was different: I had a hypothesis in mind.

Specifically, I expected to replicate at least two factors seen in preferences towards women, and actually suspected that all the factors here would be reminiscent of attraction patterns towards women. If this were true, it would mean sexual orientation isn’t a wide gulf that separates people by their preferences—it would mean there’s really only a single set of dials inside of us telling us how much to care about different things. If I’m right, then the only difference between any of us, male, female, gay, straight, or otherwise, would just be the setting on each of the dials.

So this time, rather than concerning myself with eigenvalues, I just extracted five factors and checked what they looked like. Unfortunately, because I’m not confirming a previous analysis with known items, I can’t apply the common techniques of confirmatory factor analysis to check whether the dimensions underlying attraction to men and women are the same. In other words, whether these really are the same five factors as govern attractiveness towards women is something you’ll have to decide for yourselves.

Also! This time I enlisted the aid of Mrs. Apple Pie in generating AI pictures to represent the different kinds of men people are interested in. Partly (as she worked out) I wanted help because AI is more reluctant about generating images of men, but also (as she seemed surprisingly slow to intuit) I’m not actually that interested in spending hours staring at pictures of other dudes.

Factor 1: Artists vs Heroes

The most systematic way in which those opinions differ relates to strength and power. Some women are looking for more creative men who may be long-haired, shy, and physically unimposing, while others are looking for a hero or even a superhero, putting a premium on bulging muscles, broad jaws, athletic prowess, deep voices, an imposing stature, and—interestingly—cologne, guns, wealth, and uniforms.

You may remember what I said last time about physical traits like height and penis size being third-tier, highly negotiable traits for most people who’re into men. While that is true in general, it’s not true for people at the right side of this dimension. And it’s even reversed for people at the extreme left side: if we look only at the five respondents at the extreme left, two standard deviations below average, we find three of the five actively preferred small genitals over large genitals, and four strongly desired a short man, while the others didn’t care. None of them wanted the traditional hunk. It’s the shy, slender creative types that make their hearts flutter.

The best single-item indicators for this dimension are bulging muscles and long hair. Both traits are similar in terms of their overall popularity, but according to these results, people who prefer one over the other are at opposite ends of the spectrum. It isn’t that either sort of person prizes long hair or bulging muscles above all else; if it helps, you can understand people at the right side of the spectrum by tilting your screen 45 degrees to the left—or further—and seeing how broad shoulders, deep voices, and athletic rise to the top. Turn it the other way to see what people at the left side are like, and traits like artistic and musically talented, and even narrow shoulders begin to surpass the usual popular traits brilliant, sympathetic and kind. But long hair and muscularity are among the strongest-loading traits on this dimension.

Although muscularity is wonderfully diagnostic for the heroic dimension, the desire for money, firearms, and uniforms should give a clue about the political aspect of this factor: it correlates with both conservatism (r = 0.29, p = 0.0000051) and tough-mindedness (r = 0.22, p = 0.0017). But whatever their political leanings, women who score high in this factor are not interested in pretty boys or starving musicians. If they aren’t looking for a man in finance, they dream of a strong, powerful man who can literally sweep them off their feet.

It’s worth pointing out that leftists often treat the dominant, virile, musclebound man as a male power fantasy, and like to analyze superhero comics through a critical or even hostile feminist lens. I wonder how these writers would react to the idea that this is a more compelling fantasy for many straight women and gay men than it is for heterosexual men. But moreover, I really have to ask—have none of them ever read romance novels? Have they never so much as passed by the covers at the checkout, or glanced at an add for Fifty Shades of Grey? The very tall, wealthy, powerful male is a staple of romance novels. And while obsessing over such men may not be typical, any more than it’s typical to quit your job to become a groupie for a long-haired starving musician, by my numbers here, either preference is still perfectly normal.

Factor 2: Pretty Boys vs Masculine Men

So I mentioned beards last time, suggesting people looking for love should seriously forget about them as something that doesn’t matter. If you’re trying to appeal to as many women (or gay men) as possible in order to maximize your chances, then this is absolutely true. But it’s also only half of the story, because some people absolutely adore masculine features like facial hair, along with chest hair, rugged looks, shaved heads, and scars, while others put a premium on smooth skin, pretty faces, slender bodies, and teenagers.

That’s right; though teenage boys are pretty unappealing to most people, those at the low side of the masculine dimension will at least spare them a look.

There’s been a lot of interest lately in the unsurprising finding that men mostly like women in their early twenties, while women mostly like men who are near their own age.6 I say the finding is unsurprising because it’s usually been a feature of marriage patterns for older men to marry younger women across the world and throughout history.7

Yes, I have seen some interesting economic arguments that explain this in terms of different income potentials for men and women, which cause young women to marry older men whose income potential has been revealed, even without their actually preferring older men.8 And it has been shown that as wage equality rises, so does the age at which women marry.9 It’s a general principle in science that we should prefer the simpler model over a more complex one, so I can understand why people might presume that the only reason young women ever go for older men is because they really want to know how much their partner will make, while straight men don’t care because they make plenty of money.

But growing up and living among human beings, it’s incredibly difficult not to notice the way women like older men. Search prefer younger guys and you’ll find a single, lonely Redditor asking Am I the only one who seems to prefer younger guys? Meanwhile, as Sean Connery was getting ready to keel over and die, Today wished him a happy birthday, saying “After 85 years, you're still one of Hollywood's most handsome and suave leading men.”

The gap in age preferences between men and women is one of the most robust findings of cross-cultural studies,10 ever since David Buss’s famous cross-cultural survey of 37 cultures, when a women’s ideal long-term mate was found on average to be 3.4 years older than herself.11 So maybe economists are able to explain why women prefer older men in terms of wage gaps, but speaking of wages in the broad sense, these gaps have been around for an awfully long time. Eventually evolution starts to notice, and that’s where we are today.

Yet obviously we can see by the results of this survey that not everyone likes older men. So what were the people in my sample looking for when they showed an interest in younger guys? It seems what people on the left side of this dimension like is pretty young men with fair skin, light eyes and light hair, and, interestingly, money. Since money is rarely found in the hands of actual, living, breathing pretty young men, it may be that these respondents are really wanting a handsome young prince, and aren’t worried about his talents as a protector or provider.

Meanwhile, on the other side, people are evidently looking for a lot of testosterone—virility, deep voices, and broad shoulders like the heroes of factor 1, but even more than this, plenty of hair on the face and chest (and they’ll even put up with a man who’s going bald).

But look at the picture factors 1 and 2 generate when you plot them against each other, and then rotate them just a bit counter clockwise, to get this:

Compare this to the graph I gave previously, on romantic preferences for women:

Are these two graphs the same? My expectation was that they would be, and personally, I see them as clear echoes of one another. There’s slender in the bottom left corners, dominant and extremely tall up from the center of each graph. Mature and Heaviset are up and to the right, comfortably overweight wanders a bit but stays to the right, athletic is up and to the left. Some of the psychological traits around the middle definitely travel, like unfaithful, artistic, and shy, but this is to be expected given the probability that this 2D slice is slightly rotated through any of the three other dimensions. The overall outline of all six clusters is recognizable to me: Youthfulness, beauty, athleticism, maturity, curves/fat, and then this weird void that would be childbearing in a woman.

But step into that void. Because to me this is the very most interesting thing to do: look at the center of the top map and imagine the average man. Then go down and slightly to the right, directly towards that void, and find muscles get smaller, the cocky attitude disappears, hair gets longer, chins get smaller, genitals get smaller. Don’t stop; keep going and going and going until bam you’re looking at a woman. This is the exact opposite process I said you could take from the bottom map to get from a woman to a man.

Men can’t bear children, so to make up for this there are other traits that the void draws in, like artistic and musical talent. But the dial that says, “I’m not into big dicks or bulging muscles. I like short people with long hair, uh… ‘weak’ chins, and small, tight genitals” is the dial you crank up to get a person attracted to a woman, in just the same way that those traits on the upper end of the other map, just leaning to the left, show the dial you crank up to get a person attracted to men: “I’m not into fertility, I like short hair, broad shoulders, yeah maybe narrow hips.”

I do want to stress that this is an obviously handwavey argument. These kinds of stories are really no substitute for better data from a cleaner design to test whether people attracted to men vs women really do have the same basic psychological machinery underlying their interests. The correct way to determine that interests are the same across people interested in men vs women is to carry out two surveys with identical content, and then see whether the PCA of one matches the PCA of the other. But on the basis of what you’re seeing here, do you think I have the right idea? Or am I just seeing things I expect to see? Let me know in the comments below.

Factor 3: Romantic Comedy

If the first factor of desire centers on the kind of men who dominate romance novels, the third factor centers on a suite of traits that, broadly speaking, make for a solid male lead in a romantic comedy:

This appears to be vaguely analogous to the Trad Wife dimension in the survey on women, with cooking and childrearing skills at the high end. As with the TradWife dimension, there weren’t many negatively loading items; evidently, respondents at the let end of the scale aren’t taken in by the goofy, talented protagonist.

Granted, not just any RomCom male protagonist will quite fit the bill, as there’s a certain flavor of eagerness and creativity here that we don’t always see in romantic comedies. Jack Nicholson is too cynical in As Good as it Gets, and Steve Carell is too clueless in Crazy, Stupid Love to fit the mold. Although he may never qualify as particularly pretty, the best example I can think of to exemplify the personality of the RomCom dimension is probably Bill Murray by the end of Groundhog Day.

In terms of personality, those who appreciate this kind of man tend to be emotional (r (r = 0.219, p = 0.0007) and in this sample, they leaned towards extraversion (r = 0.141, p = 0.03). As with the heroic dimension, interest in the rom-com dimension is also politically loaded, but in the opposite direction, with tender-minded leftists more drawn to the traits that make for a good male lead in a romantic comedy. (Conservatism: r = -.17, p = 0.0089; Tough-Mindedness: r = -0.13, p = 0.046).

Given the way both dimensions 1 & 3 show political loadings, it seemed obvious to see how they would look plotted against one another. Because the Heroic Dimension loaded slightly more on political values than the RomCom Dimension, I did some trigonometry and found I needed to rotate the plot 0.52 radians counterclockwise to arrange the graph so that right is right, and left is left:

When plotted this way, the factors seem to give a clear single dimension running left to right, with the vertical dimension mostly reflecting overall desirability. This may seem to capture the essence of political differences between leftists on the one hand who like enthusiastic artists who can dance and cook, and conservatives on the other hand who like athletes, soldiers, and business magnates. Evidently leftist women are looking for a fun date, and conservative women are looking for more of a protector and provider—and you may recall this is a mirror to the picture that emerged from the factors of attraction to women.

But there’s another aspect to political values that appeared in the responses; see if you can guess how politics relates to the next dimension.

Factor 4: Kind vs Dangerous

Across both surveys, the most popular trait was kind, and the most disliked trait was unfaithful. This factor turns that on its head; some people are willing to tolerate those who are unkind—and at the extreme end, they find red flags intriguing for the thrill of danger they provide.

This dimension is actually somewhat reminiscent of the Barbie dimension, saturated as it is with props and machinery: Sunglasses, guns, cars, monster trucks, sweat, theatrical clothing, scars, and gold chains all load positively on this factor. Again, many of these things are unpopular enough that what this really means is that most people high in factor 4 will generally just tolerate gold chains and monster trucks. But there was a small subset that did actually like even these things. And just as the Barbie Dimension seems saturated with the kind of content that easily lends itself to paraphilias, the Danger Dimension invokes the same idea that some people have a kind of block or inability to achieve sexual gratification without a jolt of something frightening or taboo to send them over the edge.

We’ve known for a long time that the parasympathetic nervous system—responsible for relaxation and digestion—is involved in arousal, but activation in the sympathetic nervous system, which gears us up for fight or flight, is necessary to achieve orgasm, and decreasing activity in the sympathetic nervous system inhibits sexual arousal.12

I mentioned Daniel Bergner, above. In his What Do Women Want, he mentioned an interview with a doctor who treated patients with paraphilias. The doctor talked about these men suffering from a kind of “sticky switch” controlling their parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems:

The natural progression during sex is that the parasympathetics are set off, and at some point when we become sufficiently aroused a switch flips and the sympathetics kick in and we start to have an orgasm. But the poor paraphilic has a sticky, sluggish switch and needs to do something extreme to get the sympathetics going.13

And well, if you look at the left side of the Danger Dimension, it’s hard to imagine someone kind and sympathetic, someone who is a good cook, doing the kind of thing that sets off the alarm bells of a person’s sympathetic nervous system.

But just what kind of people have so much trouble sexually that they need a dangerous man to satisfy them?

Well I gave you a clue when I compared this to the Barbie Dimension, because in my sample of people attracted to women, high scores on the Barbie Dimension correlated with conservatism. And in just the same way, leftists in this sample of people attracted to men aren’t as intrigued by danger as conservatives are (r = 0.236, p = 0.00025).

Yet having revealed that, I should also point out that danger doesn’t seem like an outlet for the staid, responsible conservatives of the world. Instead, the kind of person who responds to this is eccentric and even slightly unhinged, being low in Conscientiousness (r = -0.22, p = 0.0007), somewhat high in Openness (r = 0.18, p = 0.0055), and showing elevated psychosis proneness with high Disintegration (r = 0.20, p = 0.002). Gay and bisexual men show more interest in danger than women do (d = 0.57, p = 0.037), which made me wonder whether these assocations with personality or politics were somehow a manifestation of the gender difference. However, when I looked into this by restricting my analysis to female respondents, all the corelations remained unchanged.

Frankly, it should be no surprise that it’s a certain kind of woman who likes the bad boys. For years, Mrs. Pie and I have been exchanging eye rolls whenever the subject of game and being a redpilled alpha came up; so far as we could determine, game was a way of attracting the attention of the kind of women we couldn’t imagine anyone being interested in attracting. Put another way, we always thought the pickup artists were probably doing the world a favor by siphoning off the kind of women the rest of us know better than to get involved with.

Now, though, it does look like that kind of woman is actually pretty imaginative, at least. And maybe being able to appreciate the wild, untamed side of a man is a good thing, since men in general are more dangerous than women when it comes down to it.

Still, the recklessness of people at the extreme end of this dimension doesn’t do the world any favors—definitely not if it means that men being processed by our criminal justice system end up fathering yet more children for the same criminal justice system to cope with. If we wonder why in the world anyone in their right mind would send love letters to Ted Bundy, Joseph Fritzl or Dylan Roof, well, an extreme response to factor 4 is why: these people are exited by dangerous men.

Factor 5: Ditsy Teens vs Sophisticated Gentlemen

The fifth dimension pits older, mature, educated men against people who are probably most accurately described as ditsy young hillbillies:

These on the left side of factor 5 are not looking for quite the same young men as those from the left side of the Masculine dimension. The low pole of the Masculine dimension combined youth with wealth and beauty; in this case youth is more related to inexperience, immaturity, and boyish interests. The right side of the dimension combines urbanity with maturity, suggesting a suave older gentleman.

This pattern clearly echoes the second factor that showed up in the survey on attraction to women, although this time it also tapped into age and maturity. The average ratings along this dimension rise as we go from left to right, which indicates most people are well to the right side. But plenty of people have an interest in more humble men, to the point that they look with distaste towards age and education.

I should stress that no women in my sample (and only one man) indicated an actual liking for uneducated or unintelligent men. Rather, those at the very bottom end of this scale seem more skeptical of men who are educated and mature, with only the woman at the far left tail of this distribution showing a mild dislike towards those two traits. Meanwhile, those at the right side consistently gave high ratings to the popular traits.

Now the valuable thing about principal component analysis is that it gives dimensions. And dimensions can be rotated and flipped, just like turning a map or holding it up to a mirror. So while the Sophistocated dimension here may focus heavily on age and education, and the RomCom dimension may have seemed rather unique to people attracted to men, it turns out that if you rotate the space 45 degrees so that Sophistication combines with RomCom, you recover the same factor I called “Vapid Chicks vs Great Personalities” in the previous survey, and replicate two of the four personality correlates for the original factor.

This isn’t a proper confirmatory factor analysis, but there’s enough high-loading content shared across each dimension, and enough personality trait confirmations, to argue that this is a replication.

But I’ve already discussed the RomCom dimension for itself, so I want to discuss this factor I’m calling the Sophisticated Dimension on its own terms. The kind of people attracted to this picture of sophistication may have slightly elevated Extraversion (r = 0.138, p = 0.034) and Conscientiousness (r = 0.137, p = 0.035), and are much more likely to be female than they are to be gay or bisexual men (d = 1.2, p = 0.000002).

The clear relationships with respondent personality and gender shared by both this factor and the danger dimension also suggested something interesting might be found at the intersection of those two traits. So, I plotted both together below, rotated so that a liking for sophistication is oriented to the top-right, and a liking for danger is oriented to the bottom-right. (You’ll see why I chose this orientation in a moment.)

The personality signal of this combined vertical dimension is very clear: Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness all correlate positively (r’s from 0.173-0.271, p’s from 0.007-0.0001) and Disintegration correlates negatively (r = 0.221, p = 0.0006).

For the benefit of my general readers who aren’t that well-versed in psychology, I want to clarify something. These are all independent dimensions, but they’re also obviously valenced, in the sense that most people understand the three traits that go along with liking things at the upper end of the map are positive and healthy, while most people understand that Disintegration is pretty bad, since nobody wants to be prone to psychosis. So it really looks like the people in this survey on attraction to men, the people who are suspicious of the traits along the top of this map, are telling us that something is wrong.

I should stress that all of this is self-report. We don’t have any good observer ratings for the respondents in the survey to confirm what they’re really like. But it’s hard not to think of the distress voiced so clearly by people in abusive and dysfunctional relationships, people who ask, Is it me? Why am I attracted to jerks?

This is something that didn’t seem particularly striking in the survey results from people attracted to women. Yet it was always there, in terms of the same kinds of negative personality traits that related to disinterest towards kind, educated women. If some of this was missing from that survey, it was likely because I never included “dangerous” as a term that I thought people attracted to women would resonate with. I only included it in this survey on a whim: “People say women are attracted to dangerous men; I wonder if it’s true.” Now I know it isn’t true for most people, any more than it’s true that most people are turned off by education—but some people are turned off by education, and things don’t seem to be going very well for them.

I know, because in a sense, I used to be one of them.

As a young man, I had to be practically dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of physics. I only enrolled because I wanted a job at the local college and they wouldn’t give me one unless I took classes. But I also dimly hoped I might be able to meet a smart girl if I chose a prestigous major; it seemed like statistically sound reasoning, and the longer I attended, the more likely this started to seem, until I ended up with a degree and a young Mrs. Apple Pie. But that was the end of a very difficult time in my life, and I’m frustrated by my dizzy and even downright ignorant instructors who taught me to hate school along the way. (For long time readers, I’m thinking about teachers like this guy.)

But this is my personal experience; it may not translate to other people. Falling back on that simpler, clumsier way of intuiting what people are like based on reading and experience, I suspect that with most of us the problem isn’t being alienated by the educational system so much as it is having a more straightforwardly strange attraction pattern. There was a lot of suspicion when I found the major dimension of attraction to women related to body weight, and I reported that a significant minority of people attracted to women are closeted chubby chasers, but that was what all the data was saying. So I’m now going to say a significant minority of heterosexual women and gay men are attracted to jerks, because that’s what the data is saying.

What should you do if this turns out to be you? I really don’t know, any more than I know what people should do if they’re gay, and really wish that they weren’t.

And ultimately the same lesson keeps appearing again and again: Life is hard. Relationships are absolutely fundamental to life as a human being, and relationships are difficult. We try our best, but most relationships before marriage dissolve, and so do a third of all marriages. Partly this is just another case of Americans’ culture being dysfunctional—our divorce rate is generally listed as around the 10th highest in the world—but in places like India where divorce rates are low, people have told me marriages are also often miserable.

Lots of people on Substack today are worried about the plummeting birthrate, but they rarely talk about the fact that children not only put a strain on relationships, but also force a greater dependence on those relationships, and make it more difficult to escape them when things go wrong. We spend so much time struggling to attract other people and form relationships to begin with, but how much time do we spend trying to figure out how to keep them healthy?

Take care of each other, everybody.

And to those of you who have nobody at all, good luck.

Three key takeaways for people who are unmoved by the suffering inherent in the human condition and just care about the numbers:

1. Most variation in attraction to men pertains to the degree to which people like long hair and creativity vs size, strength, wealth, and uniforms. To a modest degree, leftists like the former cluster of traits while conservatives prefer the latter.

2. Claims that “chicks like X” or “the ladies don’t like Y” are generally oversimplifications. Just as with attraction patterns to women, people attracted to men show a great deal of variation, and even unpopular traits like short stature or baldness are appealing to somebody.

3. Most people attracted to men, just like most people attracted to women, strongly value positive psychological traits like kindness and education. However, a few people who appear to suffer from minor personality problems indicate they are suspicious of maturity and education, and show an attraction to dangerous men.

This wasn’t for lack of such ideas at the time. Philosophers like Hume were telling everybody in the 18th century that beauty was merely in the eye of the beholder, and it was only the unreflective or unphilosophical who believed beauty to reside in a person. But a 2000 meta-analysis found respondents broadly agree about adult facial beauty—this was the case regardless of the respondents’ own age, or their own ethnicity, or their country of origin.1 Granted, agreement was never perfect; any given pair of raters described in that paper only showed moderate agreement regarding the beauty of different faces (r = 0.47, p < 10^-88). But overall, psychological science comes down on the side of the magic mirror: though all eyes may be different, they can still perceive the same shining beauty in Scheewittchen, a beauty the evil queen cannot match.

Yet when it comes to masculine attractiveness, the matter seems somewhat more muddled—and when we turn away from beauty per se to the question of romantic appeal, the magic mirror’s clarity evaporates entirely. Women flock to men like Steve Buscemi, Matt Smith or Serge Gainsbourg in a way that makes one wonder what’s going on.

So if it isn’t looks, OK, the scientific literature suggests that maybe it’s humor,2 or storytelling ability3, or broad shoulders,4 or resource acquisition5 (but maybe not actual wealth?6) that really matters. Women are strange, after all; scientific reports claim that androphilic women—that is, you know, straight chicks—get aroused by watching nonhuman primates mating,78 and then other reports find that’s a bunch of unreplicable nonsense,9 but check the dates on those studies and you’ll notice it takes everybody about a decade to figure it out, that’s how clueless we all are about what women want. And so long as all this doesn’t seem to answer the question, hey, the Internet at large is quick to supply an entire suite of characteristics like grooming, style, posture, smiling, genuine interest, and authenticity that make a man really smolder.

But is any of this right? What is it that truly matters to people looking for a man?

Well, at the start of this year, I began two surveys on romantic preferences trying to answer this question. The first survey was about what people found attractive in women, which, while interesting, didn’t tell me very much that I didn’t already know. It was the second survey, about what people found attractive in men, that I was particularly keen to analyse. This post is about the very basic aspects of what I found in the second survey: the overall, average ideals of people attracted to men.

This survey was much longer in reaching completion than the other. This may be because the author of this blog is male, and despite being rather left of center, has explicitly anti-woke attitudes which are exactly the sort of thing the ladies find tiresome these days; I doubt my readership is even close to balanced across the genders. However, others have suggested that there is a genuine gender difference here: ladies are not particularly keen on participating in surveys asking them questions about their romantic interests. On the one hand this strikes me as rather odd, given the longstanding female enjoyment of romantic fiction, which is very much an exploration of what readers find attractive in other people. But on the other hand, it is hard not to notice the way women are less forthcoming about many things than men—women are known to be much more sensitive, nervous, and fearful than men, and as a consequence are less likely to chafe at restrictions on free speech.

I fact, this is a finding I replicate with these surveys: the male respondents were quite committed to free speech, agreeing with the statement “Free speech is important, and should be protected even if some people's feelings are hurt,” significantly more than the female respondents.10

So let’s all pause for a moment and be grateful that 203 ladies (and also 32 gay guys, and one illustrious other) shared with us their responses so that we can finally get some idea about what in the world is interesting about men.

Mister Romantic Average

To develop a precise picture of the average romantic ideal requires casting one’s nets very wide, trying to sample people as carefully as possible to see that everyone is appropriately represented. This often proves not only expensive but extremely difficult, as the surprise election of Donald Trump proved in 2016, when polls found the average voter supported Hillary Clinton, who went on to lose the election.

With only n = 236 respondents, drawn disproportionately from my Substack and from people affiliated with other bloggers like Tove, Kryptogal, and Sophie who helped promote the survey, there is little hope of a broad representation. However, it should be pointed out that this kind of analysis isn’t like a political election; it isn’t as though my respondents had to choose between two guys, and if I’m off by a few percent, I don’t know whom they’ll pick. Frankly I’m not worried about the details; I just want to see the general outline of Mr. Romantic Average—so here he is, in all his majesty:

Notice! Just as with Lady Romantic Average, described here, the top eight traits were all psychological: kindness, a sense of humor, sympathy. Maturity was slightly preferred over being good with children, and a deep voice is slightly more important than prettiness, but beauty is still strongly desired—the top of the lists is the same for a man as for a woman. And the same three traits sit at the bottom in the exact same order: uneducated, not so bright, and unfaithful. So already there is a strong similarity between what we want in a woman, and what we want in a man.

Many of the differences are unsurprising; when it comes to men we’re much less patient with youthfulness or weak chins, and value athleticism and broad shoulders much more in men than in women. But if all of these descriptors feel dry on their own, then as before I put the terms into AI to generate a visual representation.

Although he’s well dressed, likely to be financially independent, and at least vaguely respectable, let’s not gloss over his most noteworthy traits: kindness, intelligence, maturity, and a good sense of humor. As with Lady Romantic Average, we should note that it’s probably not indescriminate kindness that everyone wants as much as kindness towards me, my family, and my friends,11 but otherwise we have a clear contradiction to what the pickup artists have been desperately trying to convince men to do: being a jerk may get you a certain kind of partner, and good for you if that’s what you’re into, but that partner is not typical. Normal people want people who are smart, funny, mature, and predictably nice to them.

Those are the premium traits at the top tier—the traits that just about everyone really wants. After we get past these premium traits, we find that being pretty in the face does matter a lot as well, along with being wealthy, athletic, well dressed, broad shouldered, a good cook, and having a deep voice. These traits seem to be a bit more negotiable one versus another, and economists have even noticed how “men may compensate 1.3 additional units of BMI with a 1 percent increase in wages” (and women can compensate 2 points of BMI with 1 year of education).12

Keep going past these and we find the third-tier traits—things that are pretty nice, but not that important, and probably come down much more to individual taste: dark clothes, long fingers, silliness, virility, musical or artistic talent, wearing t-shirts or uniforms, glasses, and facial hair. I suspect that these things do a lot to confuse people, because while they are desirable, they just aren’t a big deal. Sure, beardstyle.net will give you 10 Reasons Why Women Like Beards, but if you’re a lonely dude trying to get girls—or a lonely gay guy trying to score with other men—you really souldn’t be thinking about beards nearly as much as how to build your education and social skills, broadening yourself with travel, or learning to cook. Those are the valuable traits everyone wants, much more than the ability to play the guitar or pick out a pair of glasses. Whatever you do, don’t go for a gimmick like an expensive car, a flashy hat, or gold chains; although people attracted to women can definitely be influenced by accessories, check the list above and you’ll see few people attracted to men are interested in cheap visuals.

But what about the Most Important Thing on a man?

Although I’d prefer to leave what I’m getting at here as a nod and a wink, some of my readership comes from foreign countries and doesn’t speak English as a first language, so I’ll be direct and say that I am talking about big dicks. Specifically I’d like to establish just how important is the bigness of a man’s big dick?

In the survey on attitudes towards women, I knew people tended to like large breasts, so to find out how large was ideal, I asked respondents if they liked “very large breasts.” I used the same trick in the present survey, and asked respondents not what they thought of guys who are large, but very large down there. Everybody knows the ladies like them large, but do they like them very large? And the answer was, well, by the time the most important thing gets very large, most people aren’t really sure it’s a good thing or not.

Yet even more striking is the way over half of the sample just didn’t care about the prospect of a man who was small, either:

Obviously a man’s size does matter. Obviously lines like “it’s not the size that counts, it’s how you use it” are mostly used ironically, because everybody knows it isn’t really true. In 2002, Donald Templar wrote a little-known book on the subject, titled, Is Size Important? And it turns out that the majority of women claim the size of a man’s penis is “somewhat important,” and prefer men who are “average or above average.”13 But the takeaway here is that “the most important thing” isn’t actually that important. This isn’t even a second-tier issue. Size matters about as much as wearing a uniform.

Since most of my readers are heterosexual men who might find this conclusion suspicious or confusing, I’ll take a moment to validate your sense of this matter. I’m a straight guy who grew up with straight guys, and the general feeling among my circle of friends was either a profound sense of confidence or shame that came from whatever it was that the tape measure said. There’s a reason for this: heterosexual males are very visual and very physical in their attraction. Avenue Q tells us that the Internet is for Porn, and even a perfunctory perusal of pornography will present a plenitude of penises. But women aren’t turned on the same way that men are. Compared to men, the amount of pornography women consume is much less,14 and the amount of erotica they read is overwhelmingly greater.15 Yes, women care, yes, size matters, but in the grand scheme of things forget about it—it just doesn’t matter much.

Platitudes about how being overdressed is the key to success, or the way clothes make the man should give us a clue: most ladies aren’t that interested in bodies. It’s men’s presence, their confidence, their scent, their resonant voices that make men so alluring. If you don’t believe me, look at what people attracted to men think about height:

I should mention that height preferences were measured in a different way from penis size preferences. Instead of respondents being asked whether “height” was a turn off or turn on, they were given the opportunity to indicate how much they agreed with statements like “I’d like a romantic partner who is… short” or “I’d like a romantic partner who is… extremely tall.” And once again, while taller was better than shorter, the most common answer was still idc.

Could this different way of posing the questions be having an effect on the results? The answer here is no. When asked whether pretty faces are a turn off or turn on, and then subsequently whether people would like a romantic partner who is pretty in the face, the answers were very similar:

But how similar were they really? You can check the scaled averages in the pink chart above and see the two questions were only two places away from one another. It doesn’t matter how you ask the questions: people are telling us what they like, and when it comes to the question of whether physical traits like height or dick size or even finger length matter, most women are basically saying “yeah, sure,” but not “OMG.”

What About Gay Men?

Now this is also an interesting question. Although my sample was largely comprised of self-identified women, there were enough gay men to get a picture of the difference between what women and men like in a man. In the graph below, bars stretch to the left for preferences more strongly endorsed by gay men, and to the right for preferences more strongly endorsed by women:

Overall, the stronger differences at the top and bottom of the chart give an interesting picture of women liking respectable, well-dressed men, and gay men liking ditsy teenage boys.16 And this does line up with my personal experience; I had a lot of gay men hitting on me in my late teens and early 20s when I wasn’t necessarily very good at being polite while handing out rejections. On the other hand, female interest in me seemed to peak in my 30s, after I was already married.

In retrospect, this was actually really frustrating, but it isn’t that surprising. The stereotype has always been for men to want ditsy young things, while women often seem not to care about sensuality at all, and instead want somebody reliable, wealthy, and settled. And this is exactly what the survey results are telling us: this gender divide even exists between women and gay men—between people who agree about what gender they’re attracted to, but still don’t agree about what they’re looking for in a person.

In other words, men trying to understand women’s romantic interests has always faced three problems:

• Firstly, the general reticense of women to speak as frankly as men do;

• Secondly, the difficulty of imagining being attracted to men in the first place; and lastly,

• The difficulty of figuring out what exactly it is about a man that women want.

So I’m deeply indebted to the women who answered this survey and clarified what exactly it is they really like. Although opinions do differ, on the average women don’t like bad boys, tough guys, or even undiscovered geniuses. On the whole, compared to what men might think women want, what women are actually looking for is someone who is older; someone who wears suits and ties; someone mature.17

In one sense, this is tragic news for all the weedy high school guys who are just too immature for most women to be interested in them. In another sense, the clear message is that if you can be patient and use your time wisely, don’t worry—you’ll find someone in the long run. And in the meantime:

• I haven’t died,

• I haven’t forgotten you’re there, and

• Soon I’ll publish the results for the survey on romantic attraction to men.

What happened was that I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of reports for work that hit right around the time my whole family and I fell ill. In order to avoid procrastinating and get things done, I jettisoned all my tabs and focussed on what I was doing. Then my wife fell (again). This time it was just two sprained ankles rather than an outright fracture, but in between driving the kids around, wheeling her around the house, cooking dinners, and doing all the regular wifely tasks that usually fall on her shoulders, I am pretty badly worn out.

But the data is still there! All my work is waiting for me to get back into it! The fire is still burning!

And so, to keep this post from being a non-event, here is some commentary on three things to read:

Thing 1: Emil Kirkegaard doesn’t understand Eysenck’s research on Tough-Mindedness

Which wouldn’t be that funny, except that he’s posted reviews of Eysenck’s research on the subject. He also posts this result from his own survey (which he got to post about right away because, well, he’s a well-known blogger who gets to do fun things while I’m a drudge who gets stuck writing endless reams of boring reports):

“Dimension 1 seems to be leftism, and dimension 2 is perhaps biotech?” Emil speculates, before shrugging and saying “It's hard to say.” But it isn’t hard at all. This is yet another plot of Tough-mindedness vs Conservatism, just flipped left-right to put conservatism on the left, and with tough-minded attitudes at the top:

The moral of the story: Knowing things means either…

1. Struggling to get other people around you to know the things, or else

2. Having fun watching people around you not knowing the things, and being confused.

My advice? Choose option 2.

Thing 2: Brits Like the Taste of Detergent

What I love about blogs like Silent but Deadly is the way they occasionally talk about what things are like in strange and foreign lands. What I didn’t expect was for the latest strange land to be Britain, where people evidently like the taste of detergent. Granted, this may not be a surprise given their interest in Marmite:

Then again Marmite is probably good for you, while detergent is, well, probably not.12 But this is the Internet, so see for yourself!

Thing 3: Concerns regarding Civil War Continue to Rise

People who have never been to America may have trouble understanding what it is like in The Land of the Free, where concerns regarding an upcoming civil war are continuing to rise: Now a plurality of Americans polled believe a civil war is likely in the next decade.

But hey, no need to worry. Just see you’re on well water, consider training with a weapon, and good luck your sons aren’t drafted to put down another pesky secessionist movement.

1. A tradeoff between how much people like slenderness, vs how much they like curves (like large breasts, wide hips, and fat thighs),

2. How much they care about personality and intelligence (which correlated with leftist political values),

3. How much they like outward displays of sexiness, such as high heels, makup, and jewelry (which conservatives liked more than leftists),

4. How much they like youth and fertility, vs how much they like maturity and athleticism (male respondents liked the former more, while female respondents liked the latter more), and

5. How much they value the traditional characteristics of a wife, cook, maid, or babysitter in a woman, (which correlated with rightist political values).

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the relationships with leftism vs conservatism saturated these dimensions, because leftism vs conservatism is the biggest factor of political issues, representing enduring disagreements in personal values. Likewise, the preference for slimness vs curves is the biggest dimension of romantic preferences, representing—or so it seems—enduring disagreements regarding beauty. In other words, the biggest and most contentious issue when it comes to the attractiveness of a woman is whether or not she’s too fat, or too flat:

Are Chubby Chasers Really For Real?

A long-time reader said to me in private:

Great job with the survey analysis. One thought I had with the fat admirers: is this preference partly caused by one’s inability to get interest from non-fat women? (Maybe the admirer is fat or lives in one of those American regions with obese majorities.) One may acclimate to fatness or convince oneself that fat is attractive as a cope even as some hypothetical revealed preferences experiment would show otherwise… [I]s it really about what’s available to you in a given society and developing (or just self-reporting) preferences that let you deal with it better? I’m not sure how to test this.

So the first thing I can say in response is that the idea that romantic preferences are influenced by the exigencies of the mating market is reasonable. A general principle in the social sciences is that “If a cause can be imagined, it probably plays some role.”

In this case, however, I think the size of that role is likely to be small. Some of my reasons for saying this relate to my personal experiences, others to things I’ve read, and others to broad societal trends, but taken altogether they paint a very clear picture that there is a deep spectrum that exists at a very basic, instinctive level:

• Some people are totally repelled by cellulite, rolls, turkey neck, and other signs of obesity to the point that they will stringently avoid these in a woman, and don’t care about curves very much at all. They describe the ideal woman as elegant, perfect, delicate, or streamlined.

• Most people look for womanly curves, but also prefer that they go along with a slim waist and some athleticism. Some tend towards prefering thinner women and others tend towards preferring curvier women, but they generally like women who are both slim and curvaceous at the same time.

• Then, some people crave voluptuous breasts, hips, and/or thighs. These people will tolerate signs of obesity like cellulite or belly fat, which they consider somewhat negotiable in a woman. For the most part, they don’t explicitly like fat, but describe the ideal woman as curvy, shapely, or thick. Most tellingly, they seem to show this preference even when there are no constraints whatsoever.

The most obvious way to demonstrate that some people show this preference even in the absence of constraints is to consider pornography, where BBW appears as a top-30 search term.1

Incidentally, since some of my commenters are mentioning that ethnicity might play a role in attractiveness patterns, I can verify that it does. State-by-state data on the relative frequency of BBW content searches in America2 correlates strongly positively with the proportion of the state population identifying as African American (r = 0.64, p < 0.0000005), and moderately negatively with the proportion identifying as Asian (r = -0.49, p < 0.0003).

But this isn’t the entire story. In 2006, a study on 201 respondents in Britain reported,

[T]here are striking differences in attractiveness preferences for female bodies between United Kingdom (UK) Caucasian and South African Zulu observers. These differences can be explained by different local optima for survival and reproduction in the two environments. In the UK, a high body mass is correlated with low health and low fertility, and the converse is true in rural South Africa… Britons of African origin, who were born and who grew up in the UK, have exactly the same preferences as our UK Caucasian observers.3

What appears to be important in the development and maintanence of these preferences is resource scarcity. According to a 2013 article in PLOS One,

two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that men experiencing relative resource insecurity should perceive larger breast size as more physically attractive than men experiencing resource security. In Study 1, 266 men from three sites in Malaysia varying in relative socioeconomic status (high to low) rated a series of animated figures varying in breast size for physical attractiveness. Results showed that men from the low socioeconomic context rated larger breasts as more attractive than did men from the medium socioeconomic context, who in turn perceived larger breasts as attractive than men from a high socioeconomic context. Study 2 compared the breast size judgements of 66 hungry versus 58 satiated men within the same environmental context in Britain. Results showed that hungry men rated larger breasts as significantly more attractive than satiated men. Taken together, these studies provide evidence that resource security impacts upon men’s attractiveness ratings based on women’s breast size.4

In other words, people at the right side of factor 1—that is, people who appreciate curvy women more—are, on the average, poorer and hungrier than people at the left side of factor 1. As an aside, it’s hard not to notice that this creates an unfortunate kind of paradox: Now that we’ve developed food security and surrounded ourselves with mountains of tasty, high-variety foods, we’re less attracted to people in our own societies who have been eating these very same foods. Maybe we’d be better off with just a bit less food, and a bit more attraction to curvier women, if that meant our average attraction to weight met up with our actual average weight. Right now, it seems Westerners’ weight averages have unfortunately overshot their attraction patterns.

But there’s more to the argument that our romantic preferences are not merely a result of settling. I’d also like to point out that factor 1 also shows up in fiction, where these preferences can be observed in writers by looking at their heroines. I’m not going to pretend this is a random sample of authors; I’m just going to look at three writers that I like: Jack Vance, Robert Howard, and Robert Heinlein.

Factor 1 in Fiction

I’ll start out with Jack Vance. Not only is Vance one of my favorite authors, but he’s been known to populate his stories with “waifish love-pixies.” One of his earlier heroines, ZAP-210, is introduced as “older than her underdeveloped figure suggested… anemic and neurasthenic.”5 He describes her as a “fairy princess,” and all of her features, “the thin face, the pallor, the fragile bones of jaw and forehead, the straight nose and pale mouth,”6 hint at a delicate frame. She has been prevented from developing by her captors; freed from their regimen, she gains some color, but any actual change to her shape is indicated only by a question: “had her body become fuller and rounder?”7 That’s enough for Vance.

Robert Howard’s writing provides a clear contrast. Howard’s best known creation is Conan, and Conan’s most noteworthy love interest was Belit. In Queen of the Black Coast, he writes, “She was slender, yet formed like a goddess: at once lithe and voluptuous… untamed as a desert wind, supple and dangerous as a she-panther.”8 Here we have a fictional love interest appealing to the more typical preference.

But keep going, and eventually we find authors like Robert Heinlein. Fortunately for us, Heinlein was not an easily embarassed man, because otherwise he might have been a bit more circumspect about his preferences (or more careful about naming his characters). So here’s how he describes the unparalleled beauty of Star from the novel Glory Road:

“Her shoulders were broad for a woman, as broad as her very female hips; her waist might have seemed thick on a lesser woman…”9 You may read this differently, but to me it seems like a careful way of saying Star really has got a bit of a belly, but it’s OK because she’s so voluptuous. And regarding her breasts, well, “only her big rib cage could carry such large ones without appearing too much of a good thing.”10 This is a woman in proportion, but the proportions are definitely large.

(Also, I am hesitant to mention another Heinlein character with even larger proportions, but, well, in case you’re thinking Star was a fluke, there’s also Deety.)

Is Heinlein merely settling for a fat woman in fiction because he can’t imagine someone thinner? Is he unable to get a date in a competitive marriage market? (Possibly relevant: He married three times.)

Now I should stress that, how much of these writer’s romantic preferences really, genuinely made it into their fiction is questionable, given that they were all writing for money and trying to be published. Maybe Vance figured his readers liked thin women, and Heinlein figured they liked curvy ones. But these are the writers I liked growing up, and this brings me around to the last reason why I think developmental factors are what underlie romantic preferences: this what I observed as my friends were growing up.

Factor 1 Growing Up

Although attempts to understand the origins of sexuality are still ongoing, the general agreement is that sexual preferences gel pretty early in development:

People discover rather than choose their sexual interests. The process of discovery typically begins before the onset of puberty and is associated with an increase in he secretion of sex hormoves from the adrenal glands. However, the determinants of the direction of sexual interest… appear to be caused by the neural organizational effects of intrauterine hormonal events.11

While this quote comes from an article on male homosexuality, there is good reason to suspect that other romantic preferences are similar, particularly given the way individuals are often helpless to change their preferences. Homosexual conversion therapy is largely regarded as ineffective,12 but that’s only one example. The attraction to children is another; after generations of searching, there is no cure,13 and some evidence suggests that it has an origin in the womb, as individuals with such preferences average a greater number of minor physical anomalies, such as attached earlobes.14

The general story appears to be romantic preferences gel early on in development. Is the attraction to curvaceous or overweight women likely to be different? While this is an interesting question, I also have plenty of personal experience with chubby chasers during their development, suggesting they discovered what they like early on, without paying any attention to the kind of girls they could get.

For example, growing up in the days before the Internet, I made a drawing of a sultry, curvaceous woman, posed like the ladies you see on truckers' mudflaps, and gave it to one of my friends whom I’ll call R. This guy was known to be, well... high on factor 1, so I drew the woman to be extremely curvy, and not too thin in the waist. When he saw it, R was quite pleased, and thanked me for it, but immediately asked me to make her belly bigger.

Note well: this wasn't some dude in his 30's who'd been settling for fat chicks for so long he no longer responded to thin women. This guy was seventeen.

Artistic representation is definitely a givaway that people at the right side of this dimension aren’t settling because they have to, but acting on a basic preference. So are the Fat Farms of Mauritania, where girls are force fed to meet a romantic ideal which, in Mauritanian culture, is obese. Such preferences are obviously not universal, and in Western culture today, they’re not even common. But evidence suggests they are a part of the deep history of humankind.

Finally, I have one more experience I’d like to mention. This is a rather more melancholy story about B, another friend who successfully committed suicide, and it happened many years before then, while we were still both in our teens.

One day at work, B encountered an attractive young woman, and struck up a conversation. He’d been learning Swedish, and here she was, a Swedish girl to speak Swedish with. B was head over heels. Although I never met the Swedish girl, B described her in terms that made me think of a blonde girl, somewhere around 4 or 5 on the pictures above. Unfortunately after making somewhat informal plans to meet her and her family, he felt too shy and awkward to go, and stood her up, losing touch with her in the process.

Why he did this, he wasn’t really able to explain. Possibly there was more to the story I didn’t get; for his part, B seemed to think about it for a long time, trying to understand why he hadn’t just gone to meet her with her parents. But whatever had really been going on, after B lost touch with her, he pined after the Swedish girl for months. During this time she became a regular feature of conversation. Eventually she appeared in one of his dreams to say “I’m coming back in March.” This never happened.

While he definitely had psychological issues, B was artistic, intelligent, and attractive. If asked, he would most likely have denied an interest in fat women. But so long as I knew him, he showed minimal attraction to slender women; considering his girlfriends, the actresses he liked, or the teachers in college we has attracted to, they were universally curvy—not just curvaceuous, but overweight. He wasn’t settling for them; he wasn’t pushed by circumstance towards them because there weren’t other girls around. He loved them, pined for them, and was so nuts about them he scarcely knew what to do with himself.

While he was still alive, this is just who he was.

But don’t some people settle for women who are fatter than they’d like?

Oh sure, almost definitely! In fact nowadays this happens quite frequently, because the average Western romantic preference is for a woman who is thinner than the average Western woman.

So none of what I’ve written above should be taken to dismiss the idea that men often settle for someone fatter than they’d like. I’m also not trying to say that, after settling, many men don’t gradually acclimate to the person they are with. I do believe training to like something through exposure is typical of the entire human experience to some extent. But what would make us think that sexuality is significantly malleable? How much can the typical heterosexual non-chubby chaser learn to appreciate curves from being unable to date slender women? We already know men’s response isn’t that easy to change—if it were, then homosexual conversion therapy wouldn’t be so widely found to be ineffective.15

So ultimately the conclusion is that these romantic preference dimensions are much deeper than they might seem. We’re not all drawing from some shared experience of romantic interest. Some of us are variously horrified, amused, or astonished to find out what other people find desirable. That was really what this study shows: there is widespread, deep-seated disagreement about what is ideal in a romantic partner. It’s normal, it’s not a big deal, and frankly it’s probably for the best.

A Final Note About the Other Four Factors of Attraction

This post has been mostly about our preferences for thin vs curvy women. But there were four other factors, and in a comment on my previous post, Anonymous Dude requested more graphs plotting the dimensions of romantic attraction against one another. When I hesitated to provide them, he explained,

I just wondered what would come out of it. Are there other aspects of attraction we're missing? (Theoretically there are 5 choose 2=10 possible combinations.) You're not obligated to make graphs for random commenters, of course.

Now I think “random” is a good choice of words here. Everyone knows average is average, but any random event will tend to differ from the average by an amount equal to the average absolute deviation (a close cousin of, and usually around 80% of, the standard deviation16). And on average, any random commenter on this blog will differ in quality from the average by one average absolute deviation. So while I may not be thrilled at the prospect of unpaid work, I will absolutely trip over myself to please random commenters who are intelligent, polite, engage with the content of the post they’re commenting about, and interesting to read.

Now I was able to reduce the amount of work by noting that factors 2 + 5 really just form a social desirability dimension; ignoring that leaves only 5 - 2, a factor of conservatism, align with three more factors to graph together, which is doable. Moreover, now that I’ve made these specific graphs, I can see Anonymous Dude was right—there is actually something interesting and identifiable there in the corners of one (and maybe two) of them. Rather than giving my own interpretation, I’ll just end this post by leaving them here for you to puzzle over:

Because people of any gender could respond to either survey, there were women and others who answered, but obviously, the overwhelming majority of respondents in the first survey were men. Specifically, 379 respondents were men, with 15 women and 2 others. While there was one clear gender difference, for the most part women and others seemed to show the same patterns and trends that men did. So even though this is may be primarily a post about what heterosexual men desire in a woman, it seems that very similar feelings and judgments occur across all genders.

For all of us, everyone who is romantically attracted to women, this is the story of what we desire.

As you read, bear in mind that that’s all this is—an exploration of desire. Many times you may be confronted with a type of desire that feels bizarre or alien. One part of this story in particular is an area where I personally struggled with disgust, and had to remind myself that desires aren’t desired: we don’t choose what we want. We want what we want. Rather than reacting judgmentally, I encourage you to remember these results come from real people with real needs. Their shared honesty has given us a window into human nature, a road map into the shadowy realms of love, lust, and attraction.

Five Factors of Desire

With 396 responses, of which none were found to be incomplete or carelessly answered, this was a good dataset. Five interpretable dimensions were extracted; while I submitted them to varimax rotation, they moved very little from their unrotated orientation. Preliminary checks on my existing measures for personality and politics were good. Although all were short (2 items only) the purpose of this survey was never to focus on personality or political values, so no hypotheses were made regarding who was like what.

Representions of Desire

Although words can do a lot, it’s usually better to describe by showing. So for every interpretable factor that emerged, I used the terms at the positive and negative end of the spectrum to make an AI-generated image representing it. This turned out to be an arduous process, and considering the weeks(!) I spent doing it I’m not sure it was worth it, but every section has an image generated using the terms relevant to that section.

Ladies: Although it’s possible that at some point you may find you look like one of these pictures, don’t feel bad if you look nothing like the images I generated! Not only are they artistic representations of attraction patterns rather than flesh-and-blood women, many of them had the wrong number of legs, hands, or fingers, mismatched eyes, more breast(s) than made sense, or really weird stuff like fish, fruit, volleyballs, and candles in their hands. I did my best, and tried to pick the prettiest least weird images I could to give an idea of what the factor analysis revealed.

Factor 0: The Overall Average

Factor analysis is a way of organizing variation. If we find that X goes along with Y, and a little bit with Z, but all three of these things are really only found in the absence of A & B, then mathematically we work out all of them lying along a single dimension:

Researchers have used factor analysis for real estate,1 climate,2 marketing, mental abilities,3 and personality,4 so it’s only natural that we should now apply the method to hot babes human attraction patterns.

Factor analysis itself is a purely mathematical exercise: Put the data into a computer, and watch as it spits out the factors. But actually interpreting these factors involves a bit more sensitivity. Sometimes the patterns seem paradoxical, and one interpretation may not be the right one, or even a good one. This is what makes factor analysis so enjoyable—the sense of putting the pieces of an enormous puzzle together, rotating them and combining them until finally understanding clicks into place.

But while this is where we’re going, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that all of these factors are describing departure from an average. And amidst widespread disagreement, politicisation, and mixed messages, it’s easy to lose track of that average—the general constellation of traits basically everyone likes in a lady.

Now before I show you what that average is, take a moment to think about it. I asked about a lot of things, so take a guess. Which of these four categories overall was rated the highest?

1. A Pretty Face?

2. Youthful?

3. Personality?

4. Womanly curves?

Well, people in my sample did like most of those four traits. But the thing that really stood out as the obvious winner was the same thing that sociologists and anthropologists have been finding in cross-cultural research for decades: a good personality.56 None of the top eight traits in my survey had anything to do with how she looks or how she dresses. The top eight traits we like in a woman are all personality, with kindness topping the list.

Now I should say that my survey was designed to get knee-jerk reactions as much as possible, to minimise the kind of overthinking and embarassed dishonesty that gets in the way of clear communication. My items measuring romantic preferences were designed to be short, and respondents were instructed to move quickly through the inventory. So when people said they like a lady who is “kind,” they may very well have really meant, you know, “kind towards me.” That’s a finding psychologists have already made—here’s a graph from a 2010 study showing how much men like kindness, trustworthiness, and dominance in a woman (rated from 1-7), when those traits are directed towards themselves (left) and towards others (right):7

So when we see Kind, Sympathetic, Witty, Humorous, and all the rest topping my survey list, we should probably assume this means “around me, and maybe my family and friends” more than around other people.

Moreover, this pattern of responses valuing kindness above everything else probably arose in part because the nature of the survey encouraged my respondents to just say what they liked and what they didn’t. Just asking everybody what turned them on made people feel free to ask for the moon, without worrying about the fact that highly desirable women are a bit scarce.

But what about when you tell people to make the best of things on a competitive mating market with a limited budget? Well I did find one study explicitly telling their respondents to make hard choices sorting through the bottom of the pile, and it turns out that babes of the bargain basement don’t have to be particularly more kind than anything else—in fact most positive traits tended to be rated similarly in the “low budget” condition, suggesting that if we have to take what we can get, OK, let’s just try to avoid obvious flaws.

But this survey wasn’t that. The sky is the limit here, which is why the traits at the top read something like a Christmas list for Santa Claus:

None of this is to say people don’t care about looks, or even a specific kind of feminine look. Delicate Features, Shaved Legs, Slender, Long Legs, Fair Skin, and Wide Hips were all rated above 3, the neutral point on my 1-5 scale.

But What About Breasts?

In his lengthy exposé on male desires, J. Sanalac insists that everyone lies, and men aren’t telling you the truth about how much they just love large breasts. (Never mind the way he claims to be a man telling the truth raises the same question as that guy from Crete who tells you all Cretans are liars.) Although I doubt he means to be rude, he implicitly attacks the sincerity of everyone who participated here by insisting that,

survey responses on sexual topics are unreliable. Fancy mathematical language might make these studies sound authoritative, but it can't transform a collection of false answers into a true one. And there's a limit to how well a handful of numbers can characterize beauty.

But well, although he has assembled an impressive array of images, although he does have a clever way with words, and although he often ends up with what sounds to me like reasonable advice, what he’s saying right at the start isn’t true at all.

Men aren’t lying. Who’s lying? We’re totally open about liking big breasts!

The main focus of my survey was to determine what controversies and differences there are in attitudes towards female beauty. So rather than just putting “curvaceous” and “large breasts” on the list and watching as the terms maxed out the preference scale, I used a common psychologists’ trick to depress the average ratings, and made the terms extreme: not just curvaceous, but Unusually Curvaceous. Not just large breasts, but Very Large Breasts. And well, guess what, even when I phrased it that way, the typical man in my survey still said “yes, please” more often than “no, thank you.”

But isn’t it interesting that plenty of people said they really didn’t like unusual curves or very large breasts, even though others were definitely into that? Asking what goes along with curves, what they’re made of, and what goes along with all that, brings us to our first factor.

Factor 1: Skinny girls or BBWs?

When Aella carried out her kink surveys, she simultaneously did the world of romantic research a favor, while managing to miss its biggest factor, the largest dimension of variation in human female attractiveness, by a methodological oversight. As one of her commenters, Sam, pointed out:

Two data points surprised me in their lack of popularity and their gender composition, to the point that I wonder if they might get different results if phrased differently - specifically "older people" and "very overweight people." My sense is that you might get a lot more women for "older men" or "daddy", and a lot more men for "BBW".

But you don’t need to use the term BBW itself; you just need to ask a few more questions about curves (and not quite so many questions about executions, body horror, and oviposition) check a principal components analysis, and watch as the biggest dimension appears.

Based on the items on this questionnare, the majority of variation in romantic preferences towards women essentially comes down to preferred levels of body fat. No differences were observed between genders; men, women, and others all had roughly the same level of interest towards both ends of the spectrum. Although the typical person in my sample obviously leaned more towards the image on left than the right, there 29% of my sample was at least neutral towards women who were “comfortably overweight.”

While most people liked both “slender” and “unusually curvaceous,” both “narrow hips” and “fat thighs” were a bit unpopular, holding more appeal to men at the edges of the spectrum. This provides a quick way for anyone attracted to women to know where they stand on this dimension:

• If you like women, and narrow hips are a turn on for you, you’re at the low end.

• If you like women, and fat thighs are a turn on for you, you’re at the high end.

In trying to understand this factor, it helps to note that the kind of women described by chubby chasers is more curvaceous than simply fat—unusually curvaceous loaded more highly on this factor than big bellies. The closest reading is that most of these people tolerate bellies for the sake of curves; there were only two men in the sample, roughly 0.5%, who indicated that big bellies were a turn on but were neutral towards unusually curvaceous women. So while popular culture refers to these men as “chubby chasers” or “fat admirers,” people at the high end of this dimension seem mostly to be chasing and admiring curves.

Men on the other side of the scale, who prioritize curves less, are more interested in classically beautiful features related to youth. Examples are Delicate Features, Small Hands, Little Noses, and Narrow Hips; the term Young explicitly appears to the left side. This matches the expectations I had beforehand, as well as J. Sanilac’s claim that “Because curves aren't fully developed until adulthood, men with a stronger preference for youth tend to be less interested in curves, while men who prefer larger curves tend to be less concerned about age.” Effectively designed surveys are able to reveal this trend:

While the right side of this particular spectrum is humorous or embarassing, it’s worth pointing out that the majority of American women aren’t 21, but are in the overweight category or heavier, so it’s probably fortunate that there are people out there who are attracted to them. The other end of the spectrum is more socially acceptable for obvious reasons; attraction to healthy partners is probably adaptive. But this social acceptability of attraction to thinness fuels deep-seated insecurities about body image. Women are neither ignorant, nor passively uncaring about people’s preferences in this regard, and it’s not at all uncommon for Western women to develop a fear of weighing themselves.

This is nothing new; growing up in the 80’s, one of my friends was harassed for eating peanut butter because of how fattening it was. Someone had obviously internalized the lesson that fat is bad and ugly, but even as a kid I knew there was more going on than that. For example, my aunt was unusually fat, and had a heart condition on top of it, but when suggestions of dieting were raised, she insisted she was “going to die fat and happy.” She did die, and her husband was devastated for a while, before turning around and remarrying another unusually fat woman. (He’d learned his lesson, though: his new bride was a lady without a heart condition.)

That was back in the days when the National Association to Aid Fat Americans (NAAFA) was in vogue. Erich Goode and Joanne Preissler were active members, who described their experiences there. According to them, the NAAFA was really more a dating scene than a purely political movement: “The organization's principal function… can be seen as a means for fat women and men who are FAs to socialize with one another.”8 FA is their abbreviation for “fat admirer;” though by their description, there wasn’t much else of the kind of fat acceptance there that we see in the 21st century. They carried out a review of the research available at the time, and interviewed fifteen male fat admirers in the NAAFA, reporting two findings of particular interest:

1) Chubby chasers also vary along this dimension.

Some fat admirers merely like overweight women, and others like extremely fat women, closer to 400 pounds. One example Erich and Joanne gave of the extreme end was Samuel, a man who fantasized about circus fat ladies, and “described very large women with a quality that approximated reverence or awe.”

My sample has 32 men who preferred Comfortably Overweight over Slender; interestingly, exactly 1 woman out of 15 in the sample of respondents interested in women also answered in this way, suggesting that regardless of their own gender, at least 8% of people interested in women are chubby chasers in the broad sense. But I also had 4 men indicating the maximum possible preference for every one of the items Bulging Booty, Wide Hips, Very Large Breasts, Big Bellies, and Comfortably Overweight; to the extent that my sample is representative, this means a bit over 1% of men who like women are what Erich and Joanne call “mountain men.”

These low percentages raise a kind of parallel with homosexuality, which exists across modern societies at low but non-negligable rates. But some of you may have noticed the way I hedged by suggesting the numbers of fat admirers are higher than what the percentages show. Why am I saying “at least 8%” are chubby chasers and “over 1%” are mountain men?

2) Some chubby chasers are in the closet

In the same way there’s a closet for gay people, there’s a closet for fat admirers. As Erich and Joanne described it, “A ‘closet’ FA does not wish to be seen in public with his fat date… and will minimize the importance of his relationship with fat women if others were to find out about it. Some closet FAs may even ‘keep a thin girlfriend on the side’ as a cover.” Now, I have no idea how many men then or now are closeted fat admirers, but they claimed “the closeted admirer is in the clear majority of FAs.”9 Fat women are reporting the same thing today, when their paramours tell them, “Trust me, you’re not fat. I’m not attracted to fat girls.”10

Is there any evidence that this is going on in my sample? Possibly. Although the respondents never gave their names and thus had a pretty good guarantee of anonymity, obviously some people may experience some resistence to saying frankly what they feel, and shift their responses slightly towards thin women, while others are closeted even from themselves. And while there were very few correlations here between scores on this dimension and psychological traits, there were two interesting findings:

1. Openness correlated positively with attraction towards fat women (r = 0.17, p < 0.001). At first I wondered why this would be. Is it that more imaginative, intellectual, and aesthetically sensitive people are innately more interested in women’s curves? Or, are they just more attuned to their own feelings in the matter, more broad-minded about fat women, and less likely to hang around in the closet? Research from homophobia and closeted homosexuality suggest pretty obvious parallels: Individuals higher in measured Openness have fewer negative attitudes towards homosexuals,11 and homosexuals with higher Openness come out of the closet earlier than those with lower Openness.12

2. Tough-Mindedness correlates slightly negatively with attraction towards fat women (r = -0.10, p < 0.05). Because the correlation is low, and I wasn’t specifically looking for this beforehand, it may just be a fluke. On the other hand, it’s consistent with the same kind of prejudices masking innate attraction.

Ultimately, discussions like this demonstrate why it’s difficult to determine what the average is like, or what proportion of the population is one way versus another. We can see very clearly that there’s a major dimension of attraction to women involving women’s curvaceousness and levels of body fat, but the best we can conclude is this:

• Most people attracted to women prefer them to be thin, rather than overweight or obese.

• Only a minority like fat women, but it’s a bigger minority than you might think.

Factor 2: Vapid Chicks or Great Personalities?

This isn’t the first time I’ve investigated the world of romantic preferences. I’d carried out an independent study like this over ten years ago on a much smaller sample, and while the numbers there weren’t great, I was hoping to replicate the previous study’s second factor, which contrasted a virtuous desire for good personalities against a base desire for beauty and sizzling sexuality.

But instead, in this survey, I found a factor which contrasted a desire for good personalities against… bad personalities.

Now if you recall Lady Romantic Average above, you’ll know that a desire for good personalities is more or less the baseline for what people who want in a woman. For better or for worse, most men seem to value psychological characteristics in their paramours. It’s just that for some men, the great personality is absolutely paramount.

As it turns out, the epitome of the great personality is a bit different from the kindness and sympathy in Miss Romantic Average. Here the great personality sparkles with wit and erudition, athleticism, musical and dancing ability, a blend of maturity and silliness, amorousness, and even a bit of dominance. (Also: Money.)

But some men don’t like this, prefering women who are shy, simple spoken, uneducated, and, well, not too bright.

This factor was a surprise to me; I could see focussing on personality or focussing on looks, but who doesn’t want the best psychological characteristics they can get in a woman?

After looking carefully, I can give two answers to this. The first answer has to do with the next graph, below. It shows that how far a descriptor loads on the positive end of this scale strongly relates to the overall average desirability of the descriptors (r = 0.50, p < 0.00000001):

In other words, most people really do want a romantic partner who has as many positive psychological traits as possible; it’s just that some are less choosy. But following this factor far, far to the left reveals that there is a point where “less choosy” becomes “choosy” again: In fact, 5 men in my sample preferred uneducated over educated women, and 4 rated not so bright more highly than brilliant.

Granted, by now everyone knows that lizard man’s constant is 4%. Sure, it has been observed that people will often answer surveys randomly or deliberately badly. But if that were the case across all surveys, then I should have had more like 15 lizard men, not 4 or 5. This was a reasonably good sample—remember, checks against lazy and dishonest responding turned up nothing. So is there something more going on?

Checking this factor against my psychological data revealed yes, there is definitely something going on. Scores on this factor correlate positively with Emotionality (r = 0.15), Extraversion (r = 0.20) Openness (r = 0.12), and negatively with my brand new index of Disintegration (r = -0.12; all p-values below 0.01). But that’s not much compared to its relationship with political values:

Conservatism correlates at r = -0.27 with this dimension. This means that while conservatives do care about how smart their dates are, overall they can be a bit flexible (particularly if she’s pretty). Leftists on the other hand put an absolute premium on characteristics like humor, education, and intelligence. This is something I’ve noticed before in a review of Dragons of Eden, but I didn’t really discuss why leftists are so hung up on intelligence. This little negative correlation adds a piece to the puzzle: Evidently, leftists are sapiosexual.

In case the term is new for you, the sexual attraction to intelligence has been studied for almost a decade under the handle of sapiosexuality. It turns out that the 90th percentile, or about 120 IQ, is rated as most sexually attractive; bummer if you break the ceiling at the 99th percentile, but you’re still more attractive than the 1st percentile.1314 This factor analysis essentially rediscovers sapiosexuality, along with a general cluster of similar traits that, taken all together, can make for quite a lovely rendezvous. (Or, you know, not, if you’re so low on this trait you prefer women who wear T-shirts with slogans like “Valleiy Ville.”)

Factor 3: The Barbie Dimension

In her article Femininity is Fake, But Masculinity is Real, Kryptogal writes,

[W]hat is “feminine” is actually just artifice… performances put on for the benefit of men. None of them are natural… and we find it to be an enormous burden and really resent it. But they’re the things that make men love us, so we do them.

I’m talking about painting our faces, bleaching and removing our body hair, pitching our voices upwards to sound more sweet, tottering around on tiny stilt-shoes, pushing up or padding out our boobs, pretending to be innocent… all that stuff.

Some of this relates to another factor I’ll talk about momentarily, but the rest is a clear description of the Barbie dimension: Some people like women the same way they like trashy dolls. High heels. Red lipstick. Nail Polish. Jewelry. Corsets. The works! They also rather like curves the same way that chubby chasers do, but not as much as they love the show, the presentation, the signs and signals that indicate this woman is trying to attract you. Anything that enhances the generally sexual essence of a woman, these people like.

And while people who like this are somewhat in the majority, plenty of other people don’t like this. Looking at the two strongest signals for the Barbie dimension, red lipstick and high heels, 38% of my sample were either indifferent or turned off. They didn’t really like much of anything else besides or instead of this stuff; although they have a minor tendency to value kindness and education, mostly, they just want a natural woman the way she naturally is.

This looks like what I had been expecting to appear as the second factor. The tradeoff between personality and sensuality isn’t strong, since only Kind loaded further to the left than -0.2, but Sympathetic, Witty, Humorous, and Educated all had negative loadings. There were some personality characteristics on the right side, like Dangerous, MusicallyTalented, ExtremelyAmorous, and LifeOfTheParty, but these seem to relate to sensuality—all the terms on the right are just straightforwardly things that make a fantasy woman more conventionally sensual. This is why both Dominant and Submissive show up there, along with Older Women and Young, Narrow Hips and Wide Hips; it’s not one doll, it’s an entire array of Barbie dolls.

Two positive traits do stand out on the right: GoodWithChildren and AGoodCook. What are they doing there? Interestingly, high scores in the Barbie dimension are correlated with conservatism:

I say this correlation with conservatism is interesting in part because of the Barbie dimension’s overtly sexual character. Conservatives in general aren’t known to be as freewheeling as leftists, so where does this come from? While I really don’t know, I do have some ideas relating to the gendered nature of the accouterments at the extreme end of this scale.

Corsets, nail polish, jewelry, lipstick, and heels are inanimate objects, yet all are coded as feminine, forming a part of the womanly mystique. Your grandmother and your underage neighbor aren’t affiliated with these items; they’re associated almost exclusively with attractive women. Ergo, women wearing them are strengthening their gendered, categorical nature, something which conservatives often like, and leftists often don’t. Leftists are much more suspicious of norms, standards, and the status quo, and seem reasonaly likely to reject outward symbols of beauty and attraction in search for something deeper and less conventional.

This is just an idea, and I’m not really sure how I would go about testing it. I can say, however, that Jonathan Haidt has noted that Conservatives are more concerned about sanctity and purity than leftists, a finding that has been pretty well replicated.15 Now some might say that it’s strange to imagine that conservatives have a way of moralizing and sacralizing the mundane role of lipstick, heels, or corsets, and evidently, even the mundane role of objects like refridgerators. But this isn’t a joke; in a 2008 study titled “Is a refridgerator good or evil?” the study authors find everyday objects generally tend to be seen as morally good, and “unlike mere liking, the moral evaluation of objects is positively linked to the age and political conservatism of the participants.”16

Granted, “sacredness” is not the word to apply to heels, lipstick, or corsets. Rather, the point is that conservatives may be more prone to concretising abstract ideas like romance. It’s understandable that jewelry, heels, or nail polish take on a kind of essential sexiness because of their associations with attractive women, and studies generally find conservatives are more prone to holistic, associative thinking than analytic leftists.1718

In Defense of the Barbie Lovers

While Kryptogal obviously gets sick of this dimension, if we just consider women, it’s really not as bad as it sounds. Imagine a world where attraction was primarily driven by the Barbie dimension. Forget innate looks, forget talent; a woman’s ability to attract romantic interest is now largely determined by her decision to carry out weird beauty rituals. Mind you, this doesn’t always have to be the same ritual—for the Suri, it’s neck rings; for the Tajikstanis, it’s the unabrow; for Western women it’s red lipstick and heels.

Don’t ask why! Just accept that attractiveness is now synonymous with sending the culturally significant signals.

Is this such a bad thing for women? Suddenly, anyone can get all the romantic attention they want, or basically none, without worrying about whether they’re nice, how much they weigh, or really anything else. No need to “have a headache;” you just can’t find your roller skates or American flag bikini today.

Now some might say that the Muslims have already figured this out, but all they’ve really figured out is how to hide signals that may or may not be there. If you could train heterosexual men to respond like Pavlov’s dogs to a tattoo of a green light, then suddenly every woman can get it, and then display it or hide it, in order to have total romantic control over everyone attracted to women. No more “do I look fat?” No more “How can I make people notice me?” Invoke the signs, and they shall flock unto thee.

For better or for worse, most of us are a bit more discerning than that. This is something I’m glad for myself, as a man, because it means we can’t be so easily controlled by the way a woman dresses. Still, it’s hard to avoid concluding that a world ruled by the Barbie dimension would definitely be one with a lot less womanly tears, heartache, and stress about whether their bosoms or bottoms approximate the womanly ideal.

OK But What About this issue of Bosoms versus Bottoms?

Eight or nine centuries ago, Andreas Capellanus recorded a debate on the subject in De Amore. Translated from Latin, it reads:

[A] certain woman, with the diligence of wonderful honesty, wished to reject one of two suitors of love by her own choice and to admit the other completely, in such a way is the consolation of love itself allotted to her. For she says: 'Let the upper half of me be chosen by one of you, and the lower half be designated to the other suitor.' Each of whom, rejecting any interval of delay, chose his own part for himself, and each confesses that he has chosen the better part and contends with the other that he is more worthy in the perception of love for the choice of the more worthy part. But the aforementioned woman, not wishing to hastily precipitate her decision, by the consent of the litigants, seeks to have it decided by my judgment which of them is the better in what she had requested.19

The text goes on for several paragraphs in which various arguments are put forward. While the lady tries to argue that the whole object of love is found downstairs, the text ultimately concludes in favor of “the upper part” because, obviously, heaven is better than earth, the tops of buildings are more beautiful than the foundations, and fruit comes from the branches of trees rather than the roots:

no wise man is allowed to doubt further that higher causes are preferred to lower ones. For heaven is preferred to earth, paradise to hell, and angels to men. But also the higher part of man, namely the head, is judged more worthy in man, because according to the face man is said to be formed in the image of the Creator, and there man is said to be buried where the human head rests. Furthermore, when a man’s neck is removed, whose trunk it was, it is completely unknown, and to one who looks at the severed neck, the knowledge of the trunk will immediately be evident. But even the worldly buildings which you have introduced are praised for the beauty of their upper parts, not their foundations, and the trees themselves have deserved to receive their praise from men by the production of fruit and the orderly arrangement of their branches. Therefore, your opinion on this point being rejected, the elector of the upper part is rather to be admitted to love.20

Unfortunately Capellanus doesn’t seem to have convinced anybody of much, because the debate is still going on. For example, another substacker by the name of PhiloSophie did a lot to help generate interest in this survey, and she is pretty interested in the question of bosoms vs bottoms, asking, “what do men’s sexual preferences for female body parts say about their personality and beliefs?”

Unfortunately her own survey wasn’t able to find meaningful correlations with psychological scales, but this may be because she grouped people into categories regarding which body part they liked, rather than collecting Likert-style data. Since I used 3- and 5-point Likert scores, I thought I’d take a look at my own data and see where it led. To this end, I created a BvB scale by taking a person’s answer for Very Large Breasts, subtracting the average of their answers on Wide Hips and Bulging Booty, and adding 3.5 to keep the results positive. (Most respondents may have seemed to slightly prefer bottoms, but this is very likely due to the extreme wording of Very Large Breasts; in Sophie’s data there was a moderate preference for bosoms overall.)

Rerunning the factor analysis and checking psychological correlations, I found BvB loaded on the Barbie Dimension slightly higher than Unusually Curvaceous. I checked it’s relationships with all the personality dimensions of the HEXACO, along with Disintegration, finding nothing. Again, my scales were rough, mostly consisting of only two items per dimension, but with almost 400 respondents it correlated modesly with conservatism (r = 0.12, p < 0.02). There were no other noteworthy relationships. Because the Internet is evidently interested in this, here’s another graph:

Why do conservatives like bosoms more than bottoms more than leftists do? That’s more of a mystery. The truth is, with p approaching 0.05, it could just be a type I error. This wasn’t a hypothesis I deliberately tested; it was just a passing curiousity that happened to give a statistically significant result, so anyone interested should probably try a replication. But on the other hand, this finding is already sort of a replication of existing research titled “Men's oppressive beliefs predict their breast size preferences in women”21 (because God forbid we just let conservatives be chivalrous and interested in breasts without trying to pathologize the living daylights out of them).

Factor 4: The MILF Dimension

The last time I tried this survey, I only had around a hundred respondents. That’s enough for a rough factor analysis, but only if one or two factors are enough, because every time you extract a factor from a dataset, it pulls signal out of the noise. This time I had a much better sample, so I extracted more factors. By the time I looked at this factor, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at. Some kind of androgyny factor, maybe, where some people like broad shoulders and short hair, while other people like women who are fertile? I could tell I was at the higher end of the factor; I like stronger, taller, older women, but I knew I didn’t really like masculine women so much as I liked Katie Sackhoff being drunk and disorderly or saving the human species from the evil Cylons.

But then it came time to make the picture. And when I tried to put the search terms at the low end of this dimension into the AI to generate the following images, I had to back off rapidly as I was warned that I was tripping the child porn safety lock. Nauseated but undeterred, I got around what the data and the AI were telling me by avoiding the actual search terms and putting in, uh, “high school.” Some high school students are actually women, right?

This was a finding I wasn’t exactly expecting. My previous research suggested people attracted to youth tended to be more attracted to slenderness. This is no surprise; people gain weight as they age, and BMI increases through most of the lifespan. So when factor 1 had some modest loadings on Young and Teenagers at the slender side and Older Woman and Mature at the fatter site, I was all set to write a bit about this issue there.

In frankness, though, what we’re looking at here is a much more straightforward dimension of attraction to maturity vs hebephilia, the persistent sexual interest in people who have started, but are still going through, puberty.

“But what about this loading on fertile?” I said to Mrs. Apple Pie. “Aren’t women more fertile in their 20’s than their teens?” Her response was to say that these respondents are probably insisting that their attraction patterns are legitimate by stressing they like people who are fertile. But there’s something more going on that I’ll explain in a moment, because it’s primarily men who are found at the lower side of factor four; female respondents scored significantly higher (d = 0.62, with a two-tailed t-test finding the difference significant below p < 0.005).

We should note that hebephilia has been ubiquitous in male romantic preferences across history. In Ancient Greece, girls were often married by 16,22 and in China, Empress Xiaojingcheng conceived her first baby at 13. Attraction at the left side of this dimension isn’t just normal throughout history. More than a quarter of the survey respondents were romantically interested in teenagers:

What I find fascinating about this dimension is the way it forms a complete physical space with Factor 1, that’s easiest to demonstrate just by showing the plot:

This is really a lovely confirmation that factor analysis of psychological data is connected to real, actual, physical reality. I doubt whether most of the men in the sample were thinking about how the combination of age, body fat, and estradiol levels produces fertility, but there’s Fertile (and Good With Children) in between curves and youthfulness. Nor were respondents likely thinking, “narrow hips, long legs, broad shoulders, and hair that’s tied back or in a ponytail is better for physical tasks,” but there it all is in the upper left region.

And looking at that upper left region satisfies my suspicion that this survey is revealing some element of heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. I hadn’t seen such a dimension in these surveys before, but it stands to reason that it should be there—just as there was variation in attraction between body within the NAAFA, there should be variation in heterosexuality within a survey on romantic preferences toward women. Because if you keep climing and moving left on that graph in the direction of athleticism, hips get narrower and narrower, shoulders get broader and broader. Legs get longer and longer; bodies get taller and taller. People get less and less fertile, sympathetic, and submissive, until bam you’re looking at a man.

So put another way, the MILF dimension isn’t just about liking older vs. younger women; it’s about liking more athletic vs more fertile women.

What are the psychological relationships with this dimension? Ironically, Tough-Mindedness and Conservatism both correlate negatively (r = -0.24, p < 0.000002). The woke on the tender-minded left are obsessed with calling their political opponents transphobes, because transphobia’s the latest thing, and it’s definitely a Threat to Our Democracy or something. But while “hebephile” doesn’t exactly have much sting, it’s evidently a thing if you live on the tough right. On the other hand, the suggestion of homosexuality at the high end of the MILF dimension implies that the Tender-minded Leftists at the other side of the political map are less heterosexual, which, to be fair, is pretty well known.2324

Factor 5: Temptresses vs Trad Wives

It isn’t until factor 5 that conservatism really comes into its own. This last dimension is mostly described by positively-loading items like Young, Fertile, Shy, Short, Small Hands, Sympathetic, Submissive, Good With Children, A Good Cook, and Kind. Negatively loading items are few, and mostly seem to describe scary temptresses: Unfaithful, Dominant, Free Thinking, Dangerous.

And well, this is a beauty standard that women on the right are intimately familiar with: It correlates positively with conservatism (r = 0.27, p < 0.0000001), and slightly with Honesty (r = 0.10, p < 0.05, although this latter relationship seems to be an artifact of previously established higher conservative Honesty, and disappears when controlling for conservatism).

Since this factor mostly consisted of nonphysical traits, just like factor 2, I checked what they looked like graphed against one another. Both of these factors relate to conservatism to the exact same degree (|r| = 0.27), so Mrs. Apple Pie said I should spend another hour making yet another graph I chose to rotate them 45 degrees so we can see traits valued by conservatives at the right, and traits valued by leftists at the left.

Combining the two factors like this really makes clear which political tribe likes what. Nobody much likes dangerous or unfaithful woman, but according to this, the leftists of Blue Tribe will put up with them. Similarly very few people like stupid women, but the conservatives of Red Tribe will put up with them. And everybody, conservatives and leftists, love the intersection of both dimensions, so much that the upper area is where all the most popular traits go. (And there’s barely anything in the lower area, because then my survey would have had to be filled with items like Malodorous, Cross Eyed, Pyromaniac, and Bag Lady.)

The politically charged horizontal axis of this graph is probably related to—if not the source of—the fertility disparity between the left and right. Conservatives often frame this disparity as something caused by what feminists or leftists tell women: “You don’t need a man or children, you need a degree, you need a career, you need respect,” and so on. But it really may be much more basic, relating to their paramours’ preferences and expectations of normalcy.

If you look carefully, the right half of this map has items that don’t make for a very good date. Kind and Sympathic girls are nice, but not exciting; keep moving down to A Good Cook and Good With Children, which isn’t much use unless your idea of a hot date is helping her babysit. It keeps getting worse with a woman who is Shy, Submissive, and Simple Spoken, who struggles to keep a conversation going. So, boring dates on the conservative side.

But now look at the prospects for a fruitful marriage at the left half of the map. Artistic and Witty don’t hurt, and maybe if she’s Educated she knows good childrearing skills or something? But then convince the Adventurous Life of the Party that she’s going to be pregnant for two or three years of her life. Keep going and you’ve got a Freethinking, Dangerous, Dominant woman who isnt going to be convinced of anything. Then finally she’s Unfaithful, and you’re hoping she never got pregnant to begin with.

In other words, what these two dimensions reveal is that while some traits make for a great date and great mother, there’s also a set of traits that exist in a tradeoff between dating and childbearing. Leftists are looking for a good date; Conservatives are looking for a good mother.

What’s interesting here is that this doesn’t look like a rational calculation. Evidently millions of people sacralize, glamorize, valorize, and even romanticize the simple, ordinary role of the housewife. Whether they are themselves men, women, or something else, people scoring high in factor 5 are those people. And if you don’t believe me, well, here’s SHeDAISY:

Conclusion

This is it. To the best of my understanding, this is what we like in a woman. Obviously no one study is going to develop a complete picture on its own, and my guess is that I missed out some variation because of my insistence on keeping this blog for a general audience. I would bet that a more thorough survey including items on some of the stranger fetishes and wilder fantasies would have fleshed out the dimensions better. For instance, I still have no idea who likes double-jointed women with wings, green skin, and a BDSM fetish. Maybe that’s a study for another day. But for right now, if you’re reading this and it’s not yet June of 2025, do me a favor:

Please ask your favorite lady to look at the survey for people Attracted To Men.

I don’t ask for money. I do this for free, and while I do have quite a few men who took that survey, I really need more women to give it a look—I only have 143 responses, and unless I can get more than about 300, there’s no way I’ll be able to get the detail or clarity I did here. If you can help me out on this, maybe we’ll finally figure out the much more mysterious question of what in the world anyone could ever want with a man.

New readers might find it odd that I’m so skeptical about philosophy. To substantiate my position, I could easily cite philosophers like Stove who’ve argued quite eloquently that philosophy as a discipline (and really, the entire human race) is mad.1 I could go on to cite Lorenzo Warby who explains why: philosophy lacks tests that tether it to reality, “which makes it very easy to wander off into grandiose nonsense.”

But ultimately if we want to establish how successful philosophy has been, the best way is to avoid citing philosophers entirely. The proof, unfortunately, is in the pudding: After thousands of years, we are no closer to a consensus on very simple questions, like, “Does beauty exist?” I don’t need philosophers to be able to measure beauty the way physicists measure the age of the universe, or produce beauty the way chemical engineers produce polymers. If philosophy were anything like science we’d have both of those things by now, but frankly I’d be happy just to know whether things like God, or morality, or beauty, even exist. And I’d like to approach an answer to some of those questions soon (read: ever, before I die) and so I hope that I can be forgiven for failing to sit patiently and let philosophers waste another 2500 years trying to resolve them for me. I’d like to figure out some methodologies or tools, like the principle of non-contradiction, to solve them myself.

Unfortunately, if philosophy is largely a residuum of failure, and, if philosophers have been using the principle of non-contradiction since Aristotle, then some might say this gives reason to suspect that non-contradiction could be a dead end. Right? If a schizophrenic homeless person comes up to you and explains she’s been taking cariprazine to quiet the demonic voices that follow her around as she’s dragging her shopping cart along the river, you might well suspect that cariprazine doesn’t work very well. Granted, maybe she’d be much worse without it. Maybe she’d be in the river, chasing demons around. But she’s not a very good success story for cariprazine, any more than philosophy is a good success story for the principle of non-contradiction.

Now, science and mathematics actually do give good reason to think non-contradiction is really, really good. Mathematicians in particular have been making successful use of the principle for millennia. Unfortunately the success of science and mathematics may just indicate that chemistry, sociology, and set theory are realms without contradictions, where we can see that, if we ever encounter a contradiction, that really just means one of our assumptions or steps was wrong. But how do we know that living, breathing contradictions do not lurk within the fields of ethics, or aesthetics, or metaphysics? How do we know there are no such things as dialetheias?

Dialetheias

A dialetheia is a Janus-headed monstrosity, both true and false. That such horrors have even been conceived in philosophy might very well be taken as evidence for the peculiar madness of philosophers. L Scott Urban pointed out of dialetheism that “It seems like one of those ideas that accidentally make the thinker stupider, long-term,” and unfortunately that seems fairly typical of philosophy in general.

Still, however damaging dialetheias may be to the intellect, in fairness I must admit to a certain fascination for the creatures. Like ghosts or UFOs, dialetheias have never been convincingly captured on film, but rumors persist regarding their existence, and entire fields of logic have been devised to safeguard against the threat they present to sane and ordered thinking. Unlike an ordinary monster, there can be no hiding from a dialetheia, no way to sneak past it while it is distracted, no hope of eluding an aberration with eyes in the back of its head.

Yet the primary difficulty with dialetheias is actually discovering them, not avoiding them. Non-philosophers who hear about them largely dismiss them as ridiculous, and sensibly ask questions like:

Can anyone provide a contradiction which could not easily be interpreted to be a matter of imprecision of language, or to concern primarily speech acts and the like, or to reduce to the Liar Paradox, and therefore plausibly… be simply accepted?2

Or:

Can anyone provide a good reason why Dialetheism (or paraconsistent logic, in which contradictions may arise without trivializing truth) is expedient, even if one does not believe that there are statements which are in fact true at the same time as their negations are?3

Yet arguments of this form are not particularly reassuring. “We haven’t found one yet” isn’t strong evidence against their existence, and “Believing in dialethias isn’t expedient if we can’t find any” at best just tells us to forget about them.

Aside from self-referential claims, every statement we know of, like “4 + 4 = 8,” or “I’m eating an orange right now,” or “Vladimir Putin will die some time in 2030” is either true or false. Statements like “zebras are black and white” are not contradictions; a proper dialetheia would take the form “zebras are white,” and be both true and not true in the same sense at the same time.

Can This Ever Happen?

Well, philosophers often talk about truth-makers as things floating around in reality which that make statements true or not.4 If we talk about how “The tip of the Statue of Liberty is over 90m up from the ground,” then the height of the statue measured from the ground is a relevant truth-maker for that statement—the thing that makes the statement true. If I talk about how “Not all toilet paper is white,” then these examples right here are the things that make my statement true:

So far so good. But as has been pointed out by two 21st century philosophers, Boccardi and Perelda, if there were ever any truthmakers that contradicted one another, then, a dialetheia would result:

We have argued that a much more promising ontology for dialetheism… is one according to which the world is overdetermined by containing mutually incoherent facts. In our terminology, these facts are in material opposition but not in existential opposition: they do determinately coexist. Material oppositions can obtain either between positive facts (as is the case in Fine’s Fragmentalism), or between a positive and a negative fact (as in Priest’s account of motion if one adopts his polarity view of negative facts)… Dialetheism lives and dies with the prospects of a positive account of negative truths.5

Although I’m not going to review the entirety of their argument, it seems to me rather pursuasive. So, what about negative truths?

If we talk about how “a store contains no rolls of colored toilet paper,” a natural question is, “where is the truth maker for that statement?” There’s no toilet paper there, so there’s no actual object making the statement true. Clearly there could be a truth-maker for a statement about how “there is a roll of colored toilet paper in the store,” because any non-white roll of toilet paper in the store would make that statement true. But can there be a truth maker for the statement “there is no roll of colored toilet paper in this store?”

Personally, as soon as I start thinking about this, I immediately consider the way I could write a computer program that could check the truth of the statement “This store contains no rolls of colored toilet paper:”

TruthValue = 1
for x in ContentsOfStore:
    if x == “toilet paper”:
        if ColorOf[x] != “white”: TruthValue = 0
if TruthValue: print (“TRUE, this store has no colored toilet paper”)
else: print (“It is FALSE to say that this store has no colored toilet paper”)

And obviously there’s no possible truth-maker for the negative statement “there are no rolls of colored toilet paper in the store,” only possible false-makers (i.e. facts that could falsify it.) If you follow through the process above, we start off in the first line by saying the statement is true, and only make it false by finding non-white toilet paper in lines 3 & 4. Yes, there is a possible truth-maker for the statement “there is colored toilet paper in the store,” but this only reinforces the classical idea that if a proposition P has a truth value, then its negation, ~P, gets the opposite truth value for free: Truth(~P) = 1 - Truth(P). We know computer programming works, and this is the way you’d do it with a computer program, ergo, this is how it works in reality.

I’m consciously using a style of argumentation that’s a bit rough—I’m really hugging the safe and reliable STEM fields I know I can trust, and the argument looks a lot like “Computer programs are real, and I see no negative truth-makers there, so in that part of reality that corresponds to algorithms reducible to computer programs, there are no dialetheias.” Unfortunately, reality isn’t always just the set of things that can be reduced to algorithms.

What if we turn to physics? Ironically, perhaps, Quantum Mechanics provides some hope with the uncertainty principle:

The well-known meaning of this principle is that if we know a particle’s position to arbitrary position, we cannot know its momentum; if we know its momentum to arbitrary precision, we cannot know its position. Einstein famously despised this, insisting God does not play dice. Yet the very indeterminacy that so frustrated Einstein may provide an escape from the threat of dialetheias. Boccardi and Perelda concluded that dialetheism requires reality be overdeterminate, but the obvious implication of the uncertainty principle is that reality is underdeterminate, at least in some areas, for some quantities.

Unfortunately, that limitation merely pushes dialetheias out of some corners of physics. We really should have suspected they didn’t exist there anyway, since the sciences are realms where contradictions are not allowed. Ideally, it would be extremely helpful if we could vanquish dialetheias from philosophy.

Now the field of philosophy does provide elegant ways of demonstrating that there are no negative truth-makers, such as the one Saenz gave 2014:

Consider then the smallest of all worlds, the empty world, where no concrete thing exists, and the following list of truths in the empty world: <There are no Martians>, <There are no hobbits>, <There are no humans, rocks, chairs, and houses>, etc. If the empty world were actual, if there were no concrete things, then it would be true that there are no Martians, no hobbits, and no humans. But in the empty world, what entity plays the role of making all these truths true?6

I really like this argument. Obviously no entity can be a truth-maker in an empty world, since there is nothing in the empty world to be a truth-maker. I would argue further that there are no false-makers either; in the empty world, “There are no Martians” is true because no Martian could be found to make it false.

The trouble I have with arguments like this is that they prompt rejoinders that are hard to deal with. Consider Trivialia, a vast and variegated trivialist world where everything is true and false because of a single truthmaker we’ll call Old Nick. In Trivialia, Old Nick has the metaphysical power to make sentences true and false, which he does without hesitation for all sentences. Every sentence in Trivialia is a dialethia, in a sense, because at its core, every sentence is about Old Nick.

Please do allow me apologize for inventing Trivialia—I’m sorry if I’m making myself stupider, and you along with me, because I really don’t want dialetheias to exist! But there is a reason I proposed this world, which will become clear as soon as I ask this question:

Is reality closer to the empty world, or, is it closer to Trivialia?

At first glance, reality is not really like the empty world, because the world we live in is, so far as we can tell, infinite, and absolutely brimming with strange and colorful things. If we had to pick, our world looks more like Trivialia. Remember, Trivialia is vast and variegated, and full of things to talk about, just like our world. “Is frozen yoghurt any good?” “Is Donald Trump literally Hitler?” We can (and do) say both yes and no to these statements, quite regularly. So our world actually looks like Trivialia, and the conclusion we can draw from this similarity is that there are dialethia, and maybe, they are everywhere.

Like most sensible people, Saenz obviously doesn’t want this. He wants our world to be like the empty world, just… not empty. He wants us to learn something about our world by imagining that it were different. But the empty world is extremely different from reality, not only because there are absolutely no things there, but because of what follows from that nothingness: Nobody can even speak the sentences we would like to be true or false in the empty world. All sentences about the empty world have to originate from outside of it, whereas all sentences we know of about our world originate from within it.7

Trivialia, in contrast to the empty world, is full of sentences, exactly like our own world.

Of course there are rejoinders to these rejoinders that might be able to expose their sophistry. But unfortunately that’s all they are, just rejoinders. They never end; they just lead further and further into the swamp.

A Way Out

So far, this is the way philosophy has always been: A world of ideas going back and forth, spiraling deeper and deeper without consensus, because the philosophers’ toolkit isn’t like the toolkit of mathematicians or scientists; there is no reality test there, no clear method by which the truth can be revealed. And if ours is a world where dialetheias exist, even the principle of non-contradiction is useless for showing us the way.

But in fact, I do believe that I have found a way to escape from this swamp. The trouble, of course, is to clearly explain it, but I’ll try to post what I’ve figured out soon. In the meantime, it’s useless to deny that this is where we have been floundering for millennia. Better to at least admit that, if we must go wandering away from the safe shores of scientific empiricism, it would be very good to have some protection from the abominations lurking deep within the darkness of philosophy.

Lately I’ve gotten a lot of interest in political values, so I thought I’d offer some of the extensive data I have on politics. Even though I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, before American politics was the minefield it is today, my parents and their families were bitterly divided politically, and I’ve been navigating the conflicting social spaces of the left and the right from a young age.

Most Westerners are by now familiar with the idea that there is more to politics than just left and right. However, the second largest dimension, after conservatism vs leftism, isn’t libertarianism—rather, it’s another dimension, called realism, pragmatism, or, traditionally, Tough-Mindedness vs Tender-Mindedness.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, tough-minded attitudes have become generally taboo. Hans Eysenck, the psychologist who did most to drive this research paradigm forward, was deeply embittered towards the fascists and communists responsible for not only the deaths of millions worldwide, but the loss of his maternal grandmother to a Nazi concentration camp.1

Yet while I have been able to personally verify the thrust of Eysenck’s findings, the tendency to smooth over complexity has relegated a huge swath of ideas—true and false, good and bad—to the realm of the twisted and perverse. Yes, it is true that Eysenck and his contemporaries successfully established that tough-minded groups display more dominance and aggression than controls. And this finding is still true today, as I’ll show from my own research. However, while Eysenck was a signatory of the Humanist Manifesto, his own beliefs were never monolithically tender minded. He argued that ethnic gaps in intelligence had a genetic origin.2 He promoted the use of harsh punishment to curtail criminality.3 He even resisted admitting a direct link between smoking and cancer, writing that “simplistic formulations like ‘Smoking causes cancer’ have no part to play in the scientific study of this disease.”4

I’m not arguing Eysenck was right about any of these stances; but I do want point out that something has been lost since Eysenck died. More than anything else Eysenck ever wrote, what always endeared him to me were these lines in his autobiography:

I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts.5

For their time, these were hardly unusual ideas, but in the conext of the current tender-minded millieux they take on a much sharper flavor. While I’ve reluctantly learned that tact does matter, even in science, I will ask readers to consider whether they would prefer people deal with them tactfully or truthfully. When tact conflicts with truth, it simply becomes anther word for lies. Put this way, it becomes much harder to argue in favor of politely mouthing the gentle beliefs of the day.

And while the tough-minded may simply shrug off ethical dilemmas and ask whether morality even exists, tender-mindedness has always struggled with facing unpleasant facts. Thus, while I hope that the information I have to share here does clearly reveal the downsides inherent in tough-mindedness, I want to stress that the repression of each and every tough-minded attitude (particularly each and every tough-minded conservative attitude) cannot be in anyone’s best interest.

What is Tough-Mindedness?

Strictly speaking, Tough-Mindedness is a dimension that emerges from factor analysis of attitude questionaires. Here is a very early result, combining studies from almost a hundred years ago,678 which Eysenck put together in 1944:9

Already we can see the irreligious, sexual, and aggressive character of tough-mindedness with support for divorce, evolution, birth control, capital punishment, and war. Meanwhile the tender-minded favor vegetarianism, pacifism, prohibition, and going to church. Later on, in the 1950s, Eysenck put together a model of politics that attempted to explain what was wrong with the world he had grown up in: communists were on the left, and fascists were on the right, but Tough-Mindedness was the common thread:

And among his covert studies of fascists and communists, Eysenck found these classic results replicating the way attitudes clustered:10

The results were the same as always: abortion and divorce for tough leftists; ethnocentrism and punitiveness for tough conservatives; pacifism for tender leftists; and religion for tender conservatives.

At the time, Eysenck’s results were criticized for the lack of content in the center.1112 Are there no purely tough- or tender-minded political values? It was over issues like this that Eysenck’s paradigm fell out of favor. This is unfortunate, not only because Eysenck actually anticipated these criticisms by saying that a person must have some political idea to be tough or tender-minded about—but because it was never true that there were no values and attitudes that were purely tough or tender. Twenty years later, in 1973, Glen Wilson carried out his own factor analysis of opinion surveys.13 When the axes are rotated slightly (as shown in red), the familiar dimensions appear:

Even Eysenck’s dissenters, like Stone and Russ, ultimately replicated Eysenck’s findings. Though they insisted that Tough-Mindedness was merely Machiavellianism, and reported a correlation of r = 0.44 between Eysenck’s Tough-Mindedness and Machiavellianism, their factor analysis of Machiavellianism items was quite interesting—not least because of the way it showed what kinds of values might be purely tough- or tender-minded:14

Though it seems to have mostly gone unnoticed, some of my favorite results from Eysenck and others were compiled by James Allen Dator in 1969. His graphs were a bit vague, but they detail the political map for British subjects, American judges, and here, for a sample of 355 male and female Japanese university students, which I’ve annotated in blue:15

The desire for voting restriction at #24 is strange, as is the weak conservative loading on #5—possibly these questions were interpreted in an interesting way. But everything else clearly matches the basic map.

And of course, no one who follows the findings of psychology will be surprised to see that, by 1974, Eysenck was able to estimate the heritability of his two political dimensions in a sample of 700 twins: Conservatism had a heritability of 0.65, while the heritability of Tough-Mindedness was 0.54.

So by now Eysenck’s model had:

• Over a dozen independent replications of the basic map,

• Replications spanning multiple countries, establishing the dimensions are not limited to one time and place,

• A successful prediction regarding the underlying similarity between communists and fascists, and,

• Evidence for a heritable, biological origin for political values.

Unfortunately, by the end of the 20th century, Eysenck was getting old. His psychological instruments were weak, he didn’t have convincing links to major dimensions of personality, and his attempts to show how awful tough-minded people were didn’t really dovetail with most psychologists’ desire to pathologize the living daylights out of conservatives. Boomer psychologists were really never on board with Eysenck’s program. The horror of Communism had been largely forgotten by the 1990’s, and “Right Wing Authoritarianism” and “Social Dominance Orientation”16 offered much more promising ways of putting conservatives under a microscope than Tough-Mindedness.

Does The Model Still Stand Up in the 21st Century?

In 2003, Chris Lightfoot created Political Survey, which he described as “an open, honest version of politicalcompass.org.”17 Unlike Political Compass, which started with an a priori notion that libertarianism/paternalism was the important second factor of political values after conservatism/leftism, Lightfoot gave out a battery of questions to people online and determined empirically how attitudes were arranged using factor analysis.

Although Lightfoot’s survey wasn’t specifically designed as a scientific instrument, he wrote his own code to be totally open and subject to scrutiny. Lightfoot found two factors which (apparently in ignorance of Wilson’s and Eysenck’s research) he labeled “left/right” and “pragmatic/idealistic.”

Lightfoot’s survey is the most important since Eysenck’s first paper on the subject and deserves detailed discussion. Lightfoot writes of the first eigenvector: “This axis is quite like the familiar left/right political division. It mixes economic issues—varying from laissez faire to interventionist perspective—and social or ‘moral’ issues such as recommending the death penalty for criminals.” Unsurprisingly, he discovered that most political variation comes down to conservatism vs leftism.

The second eigenvector, however, “It represents a combination of philosophies you could call ‘pragmatism,’ ‘utilitarian,’ and so forth, mixing social, religious, and economic issues. We have chosen to give an atheist, utilitarian perspective positive values on this axis.” I’ve made a graph from his twelve highest-loading items:18

The content of these questions shows that, even today, using a completely unrelated set of questions, we find essentially the same two axes which have been appearing under factor analysis for almost a century.

Considering all of the above, I became interested in seeing whether I could replicate these findings muself. Here are the results from one of the first surveys I carried out online, in 2010, on 100 subjects:

I was also interested in HEXACO personality traits, and in where Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) would appear on the map. But more importantly, I wanted to investigate the apparent link these political dimensions had with personality. Eysenck did show aggression and dominance in tough-minded subjects, but he’d never managed to clearly establish how major dimensions of personality relate to Tough-Mindedness. He tried proposing a link between Tough-Mindedness and Extraversion, but as I found out right away, that wasn’t really what was going on:

You can see that the tender-minded side has Agreeableness and Honesty-Humility; Tough-Mindedness is associated with their lack. Obviously the sample size was small, but I replicated the negative relationship between Tough-Mindedness and both A and H on another sample of 100; the positions of the personality traits was essentially the same (though Agreeableness no longer fell on the left). My most recent replication had 301 respondents, and gave the same basic pattern: Conservatives are higher in Honesty and Conscientiousness, Leftists are more Open, and the Tough-Minded aren’t very Honest or Agreeable.

What’s the Conclusion?

Well, the obvious conclusion is that tough-minded people are just bad, and as such, they believe and value bad things. It’s simple: Hitler blamed international Jewry for the problems in the world, Hitler was a villain, so that’s probably evidence for some kind of cause and effect relationship. Right? Stalin read Charles Darwin and rejected God, Stalin was a villain, and here again we see how being evil makes you believe evil things. Or if we need something more current, Dr. Octopus thinks protecting the innocent is weak, and he’s a supervillain, so there you go.

Some of my more savvy readers may at this point detect just the slightest hint of sarcasm. Obviously there’s an argument to be made that bad people believe bad things because of motivated cognition. It’s convenient for a bad person to accept ideas that resonate with them or help them justify their actions.

But if that’s true, then aren’t good people vulnerable to similar tendencies? Even if their values aren’t self-serving, wouldn’t good people want to justify their own intuitions the same way that bad people would? Being honest with other people—in the sense of not stealing, not lying, not being envious, and everything else related to the broad personaity trait of Honesty—might make us better at penetrating the veil that hides reality from our eyes, and confronting the universe squarely on its own terms. It could. But does it? Being Agreeable, in the sense of having patience, forgiving others, and generally manifesting traits associated with Agreeableness, might very well make a person especially good at understanding and accepting the world for what it is. But is that really the case?

When we look at the matter scientifically, what we find is that good people often have trouble seeing the bad in others. One of the most interesting findings of personality research reveals a specific bias that affects people high in Honesty-Humility (H) and Openness to Experience (O): They are likely to falsely assume similarity between other people and themselves.19 In other words, people who are virtuous and imaginative are quick to believe others are like them, even when they really arent. According to a recent meta-analysis, the magnitude of assumed similarity is quite substantial, at approximately r = 0.5 for H and r = 0.3 for O.20 (The study authors speculated that this assumption helps keep couples together.)

So is there any part of the political map where we tend to find high Honesty and Openness? That’s the tender-minded, leftist quadrant. So scroll up, and look at the bottom-left corners of the maps above where high Honesty and high Openness combine. There are many values and beliefs there that could very easily arise from careful, clear analysis of the world as it is. But when I consider claims like “conscientious objectors are not traitors,” “people are good,” “shared religious belief isn’t important,” and “patriotism is a force against peace,” I wonder how much of this comes from the assumption that, deep down, everyone across the world is virtuous and imaginative, just like the median tender-minded leftist. When I see tender-minded leftists insisting that racism is a major problem, that immigration is OK, and that nuclear disarmament is the way forward, I wonder whether it’s because they look at everyone across the world and think, surely, that everyone is basically the same.

But the lesson from all of this is that people obviously are not the same. And the roots of our differences aren’t just the way we’re raised: using the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism scale—the one with the red cross in it, above—a study of over 4000 twins found the variation in people’s answers to different political questions had an average heritability of 0.32, but an average input from the common environment or upbringing of exactly half this, at 0.16.21

We’re all different, not only as a result of the way we’re raised, but deep down. All of these maps are so fascinating to me because they’re the closest we can come right now to understanding that difference—map after map brings us closer to developing a clear picture of the human soul. This is what we are: not the same, but different. And while a gentle and optimistic response to that difference is commendable, the way I’d expect that response to look is less like a series of insults about racism and transphobia, and more like a question:

If you are different from me, what do you see that I don’t see?

Unfortunately I have no idea what anyone else’s excuse is, because they all continue to treat chess as though chess is The Game Smart People Play. While most chess enthusiasts may not be eager to disabuse people of the notion, many do suspect that the persistent belief in chess as a measure of human intellect is probably exaggerated. For instance, the openings to chess have been catalogued and explored many moves in, and this is something that can simply be learned, requiring only patience and interest in the game, not talent.1

And modern meta analyses support this conclusion: Although chess is a fair predictor of mental ability for children, where it shows correlates around r = 0.3, considering adult samples or groups of ranked players reveals correlations closer to r = 0.1.2 Meanwhile, while I don’t have a meta analysis on the importance of practice, a longitudinal study on the effects of practice on chess skill reports r = 0.79 between ELO rating and hours of individual practice, and r = 0.94 for group practice.3 Yes, fine, the sample size in this last study was only n = 104 players, but correlations of this magnitude don’t fall from the sky.

But pointing this out to people doesn’t change the essential nature of Western civilization, which reveres chess skill as one of the highest examples of human intellect. This is such a deeply-ingrained notion that the fate of supercomputers thousands of years in the future still depends not on their ability to calculate trajectories at relativistic speeds, or figure out how to maximize the number of paper clips they can make in an hour, but play chess:

Sure, chess involves more memorization than creativity, just like Bobby Fisher said. Sure, after you obtain a material advantage chess often descends into attempts to bore your opponent into making a blunder. But many, many people worth getting to know and talk to absolutely adore the game, so I sighed, shook my head, and played enough chess to get reasonably good at it—good enough that I eventually made $50 an hour tutoring people in chess. The social aspect still made it worthwhile, and frankly it’s hard to complain about chess being a poor marker for intelligence when people are paying you to be a good player.

Yet while everyone might be excused for thinking chess is a game for towering geniuses, no one who’s even spent an hour playing the game can say it’s never occured to them that kights hop around like frogs, castles walk surprisingly fast for bits of architecture, and the queen has a jetpack shoved up her butt. The official name of the version of chess everyone plays across the Western world today is Mad Queen Chess, and no unlike Dave Barry, I am not making this up.

There’s a reason chess looks like it does today, though, and that reason is because when chess first reached Christendom, it seriously wasn’t any fun to play. The original rules, taken from the Persian game of Shatranj, a very close descendant of Indian Chatturanga, are well known.

• Pawns: These moved forward one space only, not two at the start

• Alfin (elephant, not bishop): These jumped exactly two spaces

• Ferz (not a queen): This piece moved one space diagonally. That’s it.

• Victory: Achieved through checkmate, or by killing all pieces besides the king.

• Castling: You have got to be joking

Although the names for some of the other pieces change, such as the rook being a chariot in Chaturanga, everything else was the same. If you try it for yourself, you’ll see that the game does feel more plausible with the way the pieces move, but it was also deadly dull, taking five or six moves before the pieces are even able to threaten one another.

In his lovely article “How did the Queen Go Mad,” Mark Taylor4 points out that Medievals improved the speed of the game by adding leaps around the 13th century, which I can verify allowed not only the pawns but also the king and the queen to jump two spaces for their very first move. (Different regions used slightly different leaps, and St. Thomas Guild has a lovely article if you’re interested.) Some time after these leaps appeared, castling was introduced as another leap, and then the alfin and ferz were replaced with new pieces we know named bishop and queen.

Long and detailed arguments are made that this first took place in the 15th century under the reign of Isabella of Spain,5 but I am rather inclined to agree with Taylor when he quotes autier de Coinci’s Miracles de la Sainte Vierge, a treatise dating back to the start of the 13th century, which translates thus:

Other ferses move but one square, but this one invades so quickly and sharply that before the devil has taken any of hers, she has him so tied up and so worried that he doesn’t know where he should move. This fers mates him in straight lines; this fers mates him at an angle; this fers takes away his bad-mouthing; this fers takes away his prey; this fers always torments him; this fers always goads him; this fers drives him out from square to square by superior strength.6

I read that and easily recognize a modern chess queen being used in some variants from a very early point. Whether you reach the same conclusion or not, experimentation was clearly going on for quite some time, and by the 16th century the popular French variant was literally called “echés de la dame enragée.”7 (Because hey, what’s more fun than a crazy French lady?)

Let me clear in saying that I don’t object to any of these improvements. They did make the pieces move strangely, in a way that makes it very hard to take seriously the idea that they represent an actual battle anymore, but the game is much more enjoyable as a result. However, I definitely object to the way these innovations ground to a halt. From a historical standpoint, this is somewhat odd. In fact, there’s a case to be made that we’ve been playing chess for over five centuries the non-traditional way, because traditionally, chess was always in flux, played differently in different places and different times. When the Renaissance ended, across the entire Western world, chess became frozen in amber.

Now maybe this would make sense if chess had reached the apex of its possible development in the 16th century. After all, when something gets really, really good, why make more changes? Don’t fix what’s broken, right? But the fact that the silly ways in which the pieces move prevents it from being taken seriously should give conservative chess enthusiasts some cause for disquiet. I get that Elizabeth Harmon scored points against a pushy interviewer by calling chess “just pieces,” but ultimately that kind of retreat into literalism is inevitable with the game that’s divorced from the realm of plausibility. Wouldn’t a window into a genuine life-or-death struggle between evenly matched forces be better than an abstract competition between wooden figures on a board?

But whatever, say we don’t care how ridiculous the mad queen is. Even if chess is “just a game,” it isn’t hard to point out engaging features of strategy games that chess is missing. For example, consider Westwood’s Command & Conquer, which gives players the ability to harvest and sell tiberium to build walls, structures, and armies to move around the board in real time, fighting under conditions of imperfect knowledge known as fog of war. These features speak to the critical importance of supply, finance, rapid response, and intel in actual warfare.

Now chess does have some of these features, at least to a point. You can build up your position in the begin game by developing knights, fianchettoing bishops, and eventually castling your king; more literally your army can be strengthened by promoting a pawn at the back rank. And of course a sense of real time urgency can be gained by using chess clocks.

But what about fog of war?

While that may not seem possible in a board game without dice, cards, or a clunky system of writing secret moves on a sheet of paper, there are simple and elegant ways of adding fog of war to a non-computer game like chess that have been in use for decades, if not centuries. So, how might they be used to make chess a better game?

Chess in the East

I’d like to broaden the frame for a moment.

We’ve been looking at chess in the West for the past fifteen hundred words, but even though chess is neither a Western invention nor a game unique to the West, I’m willing to bet that it never occured to most of my chess-playing readers how fixated they’ve been on Western chess. OK so maybe you learned chess from American Boomers, which is understandable; after all, that’s how I learned it.

Asian chess, in contrast to chess in the West, was influenced by Go as it reached China to become Xiangqi, where pieces occupy intersections and fight across a river:

As Xianqi is directly descended from Chatturanga, it has many similarities, with a recognizable ferz, chariot, alfin, and knight, though the latter pieces aren’t allowed to jump, and other pieces are quite different. For instance, unlike pawns, soldiers attack forward rather than diagonally and may move and attack horizontally after crossing the river, while the generals are restricted to their palaces except in the event that they can see another general along a file, in which case they literally execute a “flying General move” to kill their opponent. (No I am not making that up either.)

Though I had friends growing up who loved Japanese Shogi, a further descenant of Xianqi, I’ve played these games a few times, and this is not a lineage that particularly interests me. What I am most interested in comes from changes made to the game in a third branch to emerge from Chaturanga as it made its way south. We’ve seen the branches to the left and right; what about the middle branch?

Chess in the Southeast

When Chaturanga reached Thailand, they realized the same thing that Western players did: The start of the game was too slow. But rather than solving the problem with initial leaping moves, they simply pushed the pawns forward, to make their own local game called Makruk:

There are some other little differences from the original; for example, the bishop or elephant in Makruk moves one space diagonally or directly forward, a movement pattern shared with the silver generals of Shogi. But for the most part, Makruk is really a limited improvement over Chaturanga, and I wouldn’t recommend playing it.

However I do think we’re lucky this variant survives, because it serves as a missing link between chess as played in India, and chess in Burma, known as Sittuyin:

As you can see, in Sittuyin we have a serious answer to the languid gameplay of Chaturanga as it began in India, pushing the pawns so far forward that they’re already able to attack one another, creating a tense position before the game even begins. The colors are red and black rather than white and black, and the pieces move as they do in Makruk.

The obvious next question of course is, “Where do the other pieces start?” And the answer is that depends on the whom you ask. The game was known to vary sigificantly across Burma, and while some sources claim pieces can go anywhere behind the lines, and pawns can even be swapped out with other pieces, the usual rules restrict chariots (or rooks) to the back rank, and the other pieces can only be placed between the back rank and the pawns.8 So for example, playing with a regular chess set, an opening setup might turn out like this:

As for the exact rules governing the process of placing pieces, sources variously indicate that players either take turns placing their other pieces behind their lines one at a time,9 or all at once,1011 or most sigificantly in secret, behind a curtain stretched across the board.12 Some sources claim this secret deployment method is the way the game is played in tournaments, while friendly games use open setups,13 but you can probably tell I really don’t care what anyone else says or does, because this way of shielding the disposition of your army behind a screen is the clear and obvious innovation allowing fog of war in a game of chess.

This is a variant I’ve played many times, and I can verify that it moves quickly, with a steady tension that only deflates if the rooks are traded. In Makruk, the elephants aren’t very useful, because they start so far back that many moves must be invested in them to bring them into play, but Sittuyin reveals them to be surprisingly powerful because of how well they integrate with pawn structures; elephants are significantly better at this than chess bishops, because they can move forward with a line. (Also it’s not hard to imagine having a freaking elephant backing you up would be a pretty good boost to morale.) Although Pychess doesn’t allow hidden placement, it does have a variant of Sittuyin using alternating piece placement you can play with AI.

Overall it’s quite a charming game, not least of all because of its cultural elements. When chess first reached Burma it was immediately viewed in religious terms as a retelling of the mythical Ramayana: After the ten-headed demon Da Tha Gi Ri abducts Rama's beautiful wife, Sita, King Rama and his ally Hanuman the Monkey King must defeat the demon’s army and rescue Sita; and while the game can be played merely as a military skirmish, the oldest Sittuyin sets reflect this mythic story.14

So Sittuyin has a lot going for it: Fog of war, realistic piece movement and strength, a cute background story, and enough variation at the start that it’s not possible to reduce the begin-game to a series of well known openings. But given the title of this article, the question we really need to ask is, is it better than chess?

And the answer is not really. After a while playing Sittuyin, it’s hard not to miss the pins, skewers, and pacing of Western chess in the middle and endgame. The rooks do come into play rapidly to allow for some motion across the board, but it’s all along orthogonal lines, and the knights don’t move far enough to connect the corners the way the bishops and queen do in chess. And while chess players know that feeling of mounting tension as a pawn approaches the opposite edge, the promotion rules of Sittuyin are complex and heavily restrcted, and the only piece you’re even allowed to promote to is the ferz, whom Mrs. Pie refers to scornfully as “a little peasant.”

So then why have I been writing so much about Sittuyin?

I suspect that Chess has stopped evolving not because people refuse to innovate (which is the cynical explanation) nor because chess is the best it can be (which is the impression chess officianados will give you). Rather, I think chess has reached a local maximum. It’s like a species which would need multiple simultaneous changes to gain any improvement, and evolution really doesn’t work that way—but neither does human creativity (usually). Trying to fix chess is hard, and it’s not for lack of trying.

A Thousand and One Knights

In 1994, D. B. Pritchard made an extensive attempt to catalogue everyone’s efforts to improve on the game with his Encyclopedia of Chess Variants.15 Pritchard’s work is absolutely amazing for its time, listing about a thousand16 variants, including:

• ALICE CHESS: Played on two boards, one full and the other blank; after completing a move on either board, a piece goes “through the looking glass” to the opposite board.

• APOCALYPSE: Played on a 5x5 board with 5 pawns and 2 Knights to a side. Moves are made in secret and occur simultaneously; if two pieces move to the same square, knights capture pawns, and otherwise both pieces kill one another.

• BEAR CHESS: Played on a 10x10 board to make room for two bears! (RAWR)

• BOMBALOT: With tanks! And detonators! And also bombs!

• ENCHANTMENT: “Tony Berard (1988) Board 76 chequered triangles; 12 pieces and 8 pawns a side. The pieces are an odd assortment: Emperor (K), Mother Nature (Q), Death (R), Aphrodite (B), Mars (N) and two unique pieces, Time and Fate. A novelty is that pawns are either male (serf) or female (damsel) with

  pleasing promotion logic (e.g., serf cannot become Mother Nature).”

• FOOTBALL CHESS: “predictably there is a ball”

• GAME OF THE FOUR SEASONS: A four-player variant played in the 13th century with rules like Chaturanga, and each player represents a season, an element, and one of the four humours:

  

• KNIGHTMATE: “The royal piece is a knight and there are two non-royal kings. The object is to checkmate the knight.”

• PROGRESSIVE CHESS: Every turn the player takes one more move than his opponent did on the previous turn, so 1, then 2, then 3 moves, etc.

• QUEST CHESS: Players move ten different pieces a turn, but the opponent may interrupt to take back a piece in response to a capture.

• REFUSAL CHESS: For each move a player makes, the opponent may refuse to allow that move, but must then accept the alternative.

• SPHERICAL CHESS: The two boards represent connected hemispheres:

  

• ULTIMA: An unusual variant in which pieces move as queens, but attack differently, with names like “immobilizer,” “coordinator,” and “withdrawer.” Though I find the dry, literal setting uninspiring, the gameplay of ultima may successfully diverge from chess, and there are further variants like ROCOCO that give at least a whimsical attempt as a setting.

• WATERGATE CHESS I: “Each player keeps two scores. The move from

  the first score-sheet is played on the board: however, up to 50% plus 1 moves may be… ‘inoperative’. Two moves later you reveal the move you actually made (recorded on the second score-sheet) and the board is revised. If [a] move turns out to be illegal, the turn is lost.”

• WATERGATE CHESS II: “The inventor refuses to release details of this game on the grounds of executive privilege and national security. Moves on a scoresheet have been found erased.”

I could go on, but I hope the above gives a sense of the way people really have been trying very hard to improve chess over the years. Though we see some exceptions like Apocalypse, there is a clear tendency to “improve” the game by making either the playing field bigger, the pieces stronger, or the players’ options greater.

In his introduction, Pritchard invites the reader to consider this maxim: “that alteration (to chess) may be considered the worst that recedes farthest from it.”17 And I think these variants show this is correct, at least to a point: in order to make chess better, we’d have to change it so much that we might not immediately recognize it as chess anymore. While we might argue about the merits of conservative variants like Chess960 (towards which I admit a certain fondness) or Bughouse (which is terrible) I think everyone has really found a local maximum with chess. Simple variants to chess offer little and generally detract from the game, but more ambitious variants often make so many changes that one misstep ruins the outcome. Chess has reached its end.

But what about Sittuyin? This is not a game that’s been finalized. The rules have always been in flux. And if comparing it to chess reveals that chess has features Sittuyin lacks, then why not simply import those features into Sittuyin?

Specifically, if the main problems with Sittuyin are:

• Not enough pieces have long distance moves, so that when one or both rooks perish, the game slows considerably,

• No pieces run along diagonals to allow for pins, skewers, or forks in those lines,

• The promotion system is complex and over-restrictive, and

• The ferz is a grubby little peasant,

Then isn’t all of this very, very easy to solve? Just take some obvious inspiration from Western games, replace the ferz with a bishop, import the promotion rules from modern chess, give it a little nip and tuck, and we’ve got a sleek new variant of Sittuyin that may well be better than chess:

Assassin Situyin

Here’s how you play.

1. Using a regular chess set, arrange the pawns as shown:

   

2. Set up a curtain or screen between the player’s pawns. In secret, both players position the remainder of their pieces according to the following rules:

   1. Chariots (or rooks) are placed anywhere in the back rank, with the king anywhere in between them.

   2. Other pieces are placed anywhere in the next two ranks, behind the pawns. One and only one of these pieces may, at the player’s option, displace a single pawn, so that the pawn is placed amongst the other minor pieces.

3. Remove the curtain; red goes first, and pieces move as follows.

• Pawns: They move forward one space without capturing, and capture one diagonal forward. If a pawn reaches the far side of the board, he immediately promotes to a knight, elephant, rook, or assassin at his controller’s choice.

• Elephants: Replacing both bishops, elephants move one space diagonally or directly forward. (Four legs and a trunk, these elephants have.)

• Knights: Jump in the classic L-shape, two spaces in one direction orthogonally and one to either side.

• Chariots: Move any number of pieces in a straight line, like modern rooks.

• Assassin: Replacing the queen, the assassin moves any number of pieces in a diagonal line, like a modern bishop. The assassin does not give check, and may take the king like any other piece to win the game.

• King: Just like a chess king, he moves one space in any direction.

4. Victory: Achieved through checkmate, assassination of the king, by killing all pieces besides the enemy king, or by leaving your opponent with no legal moves.

5. Draw: Achieved if the same position arises three times, or if both players agree, but not via stalemate.

The Apple Pie family has played this many times by now. Pushing the king into the back rank gives a good castling-like option to develop by moving him forward to connect the rooks chariots. The rule allowing a single switch of a pawn and minor piece at the setup creates a definite feeling of excitement as the screen comes up and you immediately check for vulnerabilities or opportunities. Pawns rarely reach the back rank to promote, but gaining an additional chariot is decisive. And the assassin is absolutely perfect. While it’s really not an S-tier boardgame, and it may well need some additional tinkering, the Apple Pie family all agree that this variant of Sittuyin is, hands down, better than chess.

As a final note, while all of the above may make it seem as though this was a long chain of purposeful reasoning that slowly gave rise to Assassin Sittuyin, the reality was different: Many years playing chess, followed by the discovery of the one variant of Sittuyin that had pieces placed behind a curtain, followed by a few games, and then right away the obvious change from the ferz to a bishop, followed by a few more games and finalization of the rules, then followed by weeks of talking and research that went into this article. It’s extremely easy to think up a variant of chess and justify it with reasons why it’s bound to be good, but much harder to be confident of how fun it really is without playing it. In a sense, this entire article is meaningful only insofar as it can convince you this variant is really worth a try.

1

I like king pawn and English openings, but queen pawn openings are just unfairly strong. Sure, on the surface that may not seem to be the case, and computer analysis doesn’t reveal anything particularly amazing about a closed position, but once you understand chess is a game of interest more than talent it becomes obvious why there’s no way to win closed games: they bog down so rapidly, only a chess fanatic thinks its worth playing them. If your opponent leads with that queen pawn, they clearly like chess way, way more than you do, and there’s only one appropriate response.

For all that his legacy has been defined by monstrous and otherworldly evil, Lovecraft’s actual writing was a rather different thing. He wasn’t always fixated upon madness or horror, but wrote a great deal of dreamlike fantasy. Indeed otherworldliness is probably more characteristic of his work than monstrousness, as many of his better works demonstrate; readers bored with nameless cults, gnawing madness, and ancient survivals of unplumbed abysses should consider his more wistful stories like The Quest of Iranon, The White Ship, The Silver Key, or Celephaïs.

So in the hopes of making his work more legible and better known, I’m sharing the notes my wife and I wrote down as we went through all of his stories together, one by one. All of the stories can be easily found for free either at a local library, or online at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive; but click that link and you’ll be faced with the same problem we had over the years: Where to start? And which to read?

Even after having read them all, many of the titles run together, and several are pretty bad, and we wanted to catalogue the better stories so we could find them again, and leave the dross behind. This is a document we’ve been working on as a family for decades, making small updates and corrections over the years as we’ve shared these stories with our children. Young readers in particular may find this useful, given the way Lovecraft’s political opponents have long dominated high school and college English departments; they’re never going to tell you what’s worth reading.5

It is quite noteworthy how effective Lovecraft’s stories are, given their slowness, their vagueness, their apparent overuse of purple prose and long monologues, their avoidance of action or “fan service,” the simplicity and linearity of their plots—often the total lack of any discernible plot—and the consistent similarity of their bland, undeveloped, passive main characters. Gradually one comes to realize how many of these are really little more than Lovecraft’s transcribed dreams, and how powerful they are despite or even because of these evident weaknesses. Lovecraft works by slowly mesmerizing the audience, pushing disgust, dread, helplessness, and awe farther and farther until finally reaching the outer realms of cosmic horror. This emotion takes a great deal of time to build, and it can be fractured by any component that is awry—a powerful protagonist, in control of his environment, surrounded by allies, or lacking enough motivation to continue rather than walking away, will never work. As the narrator moves forward, spellbound, he brings the audience with him. This can be seen to a greater or lesser degree in all of Lovecraft’s effective pieces, and may be usefully compared to the failures of his imitators (especially his contemporary, Robert Howard) where they neglected to follow his style in one or more ways.

Since the very most important thing to know about a work of fiction is whether it is any good or not, the stories are grouped into five categories from best to worst. Our own sense of these stories is fairly clear:

Lovecraft’s best works are eleven in number, and his worst—of those that are available for our reading—are nine. Other critics provide other opinions, and some of you may be surprised by our evaluation of The Call of Cthulhu, given not only the importance of Cthulhu in popular culture but the high praise his biographer, S.T. Joshi gives to the story, describing its conclusion as “superb prose.”6 But however well constructed the prose may have been, Cthulhu’s frank appearance is far too obvious to maintain the horror engendered by hints and rumors of His existence, and non-fans often can’t stand it. Lovecraft himself regarded Cthulhu as “rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches."7 While he may have been his own worst critic, ranking some of our favorites like From Beyond or The Quest of Iranon on the bottom,8 at least we aren’t the only ones who consider Cthulhu overrated!

Lovecraft’s 5 Star Work

Readers new to Lovecraft’s work are urged to read one of the short pieces listed here, such as The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Outsider, From Beyond, or The Very Old Folk. This is enough—if you don’t appreciate these, you really won’t like Lovecraft. We think all of the stories in this section are absolutely fantastic, and while Lovecraft isn’t for everyone, every educated person for whom English is their first language should at least read one of these during their lifetime so that they know what kind of writer Lovecraft was.

• The Statement of Randolph Carter (1919)

  • Short, dreamlike

  • Carter & Warren go to graveyard, telephone wire

• From Beyond (1920)

  • Short, well paced

  • ESP Machine, UV, Jellyfish

• The Outsider (1921)

  • Short

  • Narrator climbs from castle. Lovecraft described as “bombastic”

• Pickman's Model (1926)

  • Mythos

  • Boston slums, Artist, Photograph

• The Very Old Folk (1927)

  • Short, Dream, Mythos

  • Togas, frightened villagers, rites in the hills

• The Dunwich Horror (1928)

  • Long, 3^rd person, Mythos

  • Henry Armitage, Arkham Library

• Medusa's Coil (1930)

  • Long, collaboration with Zealia Bishop, Mythos

  • Painter, hair, old house

• The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)

  • Long, mythos

  • Vermont, Correspondence with Henry Ackley, dogs

• The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931)

  • Mythos

  • Jewelry, Gilman Hotel, Order of Dagon

• The Horror in the Museum (1932)

  • Collaboration with Hazel Heald, Mythos.

  • Wax museum. “Orabona Continued to Smile”

• Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1932)

  • Collaboration with Robert Price, 3^rd Person, Mythos, Sequel to Gates of the Silver Key

  • Ticking clock, swami, wax mask

Lovecraft’s 4 Star Work

These are solid stories worth reading and rereading, and help to round out a sense of Lovecraft as a person. The best of his gentler and more Dunsanean pieces are to be found here, along with popular favorites like The Colour Out of Space and The Mountains of Madness.

• Sweet Ermengarde (1917)

  • Humorous, different from his usual work

  • Clever sattire on sappy romances

• The Tomb (1917)

  • Classic Lovecraft

  • Strange lad obsessed with Hyde tomb

• Polaris (1918)

  • Short

  • Defense of the North pole

• Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)

  • Short

  • Dream machine, hickish murderer

• Memory (1919)

  • Very short, poetic; a poignant, personal favorite of the Apple Pie Family

  • Cyclopean ruins, Genie and Daemon

• Celephaïs (1920)

  • Poetic, 3^rd person

  • Kuranes, last of a noble line, dream searches

• The Terrible Old Man (1920)

  • Very short, 3^rd person

  • Kingsport, feeble old ship captain, Italian robbers

• The Music of Erich Zann (1921)

  • Short, dreamlike

  • France, Rue d'Auseil street. Lovecraft: “One of best”

• The Quest of Iranon (1921)

  • “Once upon a time” 3^rd person

  • Wandering singer, art is better than toil, “haven of light beyond death”

• The Lurking Fear (1922)

  • Long

  • Mismatched eyes, mansion, Martense family

• The Festival (1923)

  • Short, vague, dreamlike

  • Yuletide, Kingsport, a dark ceremony

• The Shunned House (1924)

  • Medium length

  • French, protagonist and uncle hold vigil in the cellar, fungus

• Two Black Bottles (1926)

  • Medium

  • Inheritance, preacher, grave

• The Colour out of Space (1927)

  • Long

  • Lovecraft claimed this was his best work

• The Curse of Yig (1928)

  • 3^rd Person, Mythos

  • Oklahoma settlers, asylum, old dog “Wolf”

• The Mound (1929)

  • Long, mythos

  • Oklahoma, headless squaw

• At the Mountains of Madness (1931)

  • Long, mythos

  • Antarctica, blind penguins

• The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)

  • Long, mythos

  • Quantum Physics, Figurine, Witch’s Familiar

• The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)

  • Long, mythos

  • Eduard Derby & Asenath Waite

• The Disinterment (1935)

  • Medium Length

  • Leprosy, Drugs from Haiti, Old Mansion

• The Haunter of the Dark (1935)

  • Mythos

  • Church, trapezohedron

• In the Walls of Eryx (1936)

  • Science Fiction

  • On Venus, crystals, lizardmen

• The Night Ocean (1936)

  • Long, slow, curious blend of wistfulness and horror

  • Mural, vacation, house on the beach

Lovecraft’s 3 Star Work

Though these aren’t as effective as Lovecraft’s other stories, they are still worth reading. This is particularly true for Lovecraft fans and budding writers, who would benefit from contemplating what it is about the four and five star pieces that makes them work better, and what might have been missing from these. The three star works are often quite enjoyable once the easier stories have helped the reader to cultivate a patient appreciation for his style; beyond merely a large vocabulary, Lovecraft requires a certain sensitivity from the reader that makes many of these pieces (like The Call of Chtulhu) better appreciated after perusing a few of his other stories.

• The Beast in the Cave (1905)

  • 1^st Person, No Mythos, written at 14 years old

  • Tour in a cave, all caps and exclamation points at the end

• The Alchemist (1908)

  • Medium

  • French castle, curse kills all descendants by 32

• Dagon (1917)

  • Short, amateurish

  • WWI soldier shipwrecked, comes upon uncharted isle

• The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1919)

  • Neat imagery, near plotless

  • Green flabby beings of Ib

• The White Ship (1919)

  • Wistful, short

  • Bearded man, picturesque vistas, fair Cathuria

• Nyarlathotep (1920)

  • Short

  • Egyptian, film, snow

• The Crawling Chaos (1920)

  • Short, dreamlike

  • Ocean swallows Earth, Beautiful people ascend

• The Picture in the House (1920)

  • Short

  • Dreamlike, Shaggy degenerate puritan

• The Temple (1920)

  • Mythos

  • German U-boat commander

• The Moon-Bog (1921)

  • Medium

  • Castle, drain the bog, ruins

• The Nameless City (1921)

  • Mythos

  • Archaeology, Stairway into darkness, murals

• The Other Gods (1921)

  • “Once upon a time” 3^rd person

  • Climbing the mountain where the gods danced, eclipse, hubris

• Azathoth (1922)

  • Very Short

  • Cities and ugly future

• Hypnos (1922)

  • You must be patient with this story to appreciate it.

  • Dreaming, only friend, drugs, sculptor, marble busts.

• The Rats in the Walls (1923)

  • Mythos tacked on

  • N*****man the cat. Old castle in England restored, son mained in the war

• He (1925)

  • Short, excellent start, but unravels by the end

  • New York, tour of secret places

• In the Vault (1925)

  • Short

  • Careless small-town undertaker

• The Horror at Red Hook (1925)

  • Short

  • Detective Malone, gangs

• The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

  • Long; dramatic, but predictable

  • Artists’ nightmares, police raid in Louisiana, statuette

• The Silver Key (1926)

  • Short, dreamlike

  • Beauty is subjective, Gothic box

• The Strange High House in the Mist (1926)

  • Poetic, 3^rd person

  • Kingsport, Olney (philosopher), Nodens, terrible old man

• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)

  • Long

  • Providence RI, dust

• The Last Test (1927)

  • Long, 3^rd person

  • San Francisco, black fever, Surama & Tibetans

• The Thing in the Moonlight (1927)

  • Short, dream, semi-finished

  • Railway company men

• The Man of Stone (1932)

  • Written with Hazel Heald, mythos, well suited for children

  • Mad Dan with young wife, sculptor, stone dog

• The Book (1933)

  • Short, dreamlike or unfinished, sets a mood

  • Book, traveling through dimensions

• Winged Death (1933)

  • Long

  • Glossina palpalis, South African hotel

• The Tree on the Hill (1934)

  • Mythos

  • Hike, Photographs, Gem

• The Diary of Alonzo Typer (1935)

  • Medium, mythos

  • Old house, portraits, key, Yian-Ho

Lovecraft’s 2 Star Work

These are Lovecraft’s more controversial stories. Many are noteworthy, such as Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (written with Harry Houdini), Cool Air (which received a movie adaptation), and the whismical Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, which many of his fans loved. Most controversial will probably be our low rating of The Shadow Out of Time, which is definitely an ambitious work, but we simply cannot recommend this piece as entertaining or well written. There is a general belief, it seems, that the longer stories Lovecraft wrote are better, but unfortunately a longer story requires a greater inventment of the reader’s time, and such time would be better spent elsewhere. So after perusing the three-star stories, we recommend the casual reader set aside Lovecraft’s remaining work. Fans may well ignore this warning; after all, we may not have rated Lovecraft’s fiction the same way that you would, and the two-star stories might still entertain!

• Old Bugs (1919)

  • Short

  • Woman’s Portrait, Booze is bad

• The Cats of Ulthar (1920)

  • Short, well suited for children

  • Cotter & Wife who kill cats

• The Tree (1920)

  • Fairytale, 3^rd person

  • Sculptors in ancient Greece

• Ex Oblivione (1920)

  • Very short

  • Dreamland. Unremarkable story, but provocative ideas.

• Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1920)

  • Cute, 3^rd person

  • African explorer, white apes

• Herbert West—Reanimator (1922)

  • Long, starts wonderfully but goes downhill after part II

  • Blond surgeon, incinerator, graves

• The Horror at Martin’s Beach (1922)

  • Sonya Greene coauthored, short

  • Dead sea creature on display, rope drags to sea.

• The Hound (1922)

  • Short

  • Asthete graverobbers, jade amulet. (This story is first to name the Necronomicon.)

• The Unnamable (1923)

  • Lovecraft projects an argument into fiction

  • Arkham Graveyard, Late Discussion, Horns

• Under the Pyramids / Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (1924)

  • Collaboration, Long, could be excellent if cut to 1/3 length

  • Harry Houdini in Egypt, Sphynx

• Cool Air (1926)

  • Medium

  • New York apartments, air conditioner

• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)

  • Long, dreamlike with little detail, written like a fairy story—some fans do like this one.

  • Randolph Carter. According to Lovecraft: “[I]sn’t much good... plethora of weird imagery may have destroyed the power of any one image to produce the desired impression of strangeness”

• History of the Necronomicon (1927)

  • Short, no plot, Mythos

  • It’s what’s on the tin.

• The Electric Executioner (1929)

  • Predictable

  • Mexico city, train, silver mine audit

• The Trap (1931)

  • Thoughtful science fiction, but dull

  • Mirror: extra dimensional space

• The Evil Clergyman (1933)

  • Dreamlike, funny really

  • It’s about a clergyman…

• The Horror in the Burying-Ground (1933)

  • Ghoulish, obvious

  • Undertaker, embalming fluid, funeral

• Out of the Aeons (1933)

  • 1^st Person, Mythos, pseudoscience

  • Mummy in museum, island of Mu, Scroll of T’yog

• The Challenge from Beyond (1935)

  • A silly Round Robin story; Lovecraft only wrote part

• The Shadow Out of Time (1935)

  • Long, mythos, repetitive

  • Great race, Econ teacher, mindswapping

• Till A’the Seas (1935)

  • No Mythos, unsophisticated

  • End of the world, well

Lovecraft’s 1 Star Work

Now at last we reach the pulpy underbelly of Lovecraftian literature. People claim there may be no accounting for taste, but these stories prove that can only be true up to a point—if you like this stuff, I fear your taste is God awful. Even the most dogged Lovecraft aficionado will quickly question the wisdom of reading through these. Only historians, biographers, and critics seeking ammunition to use against Lovecraft should have any interest in his nine worst stories.

• A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1917)

  • Silly

  • Lovecraft pretends to know Dr. Johnson

• The Green Meadow (1918)

  • Short, dreamlike

  • Meteorite with metallic diary

• The Transition of Juan Romero (1919)

  • Short

  • Mining operation, talisman from India

• Poetry and the Gods (1920)

  • Short, Boring

  • Female protagonist, low cut evening dress, Zeus, magazine

• The Street (1920)

  • Boring, prosaic

  • Racist (No not just casually racist, as many of his other stories are; in this case, racism is the plot)

• What the Moon Brings (1922)

  • Very short, Poetic

  • Just ignore this work

• The Descendant (1926)

  • Short, seems unfinished, formulaic

  • No really, just ignore this work

• The Battle That Ended the Century (1934)

  • Writers’ inside joke

  • Futuristic UFC match

• Collapsing Cosmoses (1935)

  • Very Short, Collaboration with R Barlow

  • Aliens send out a fleet to defend themselves

That’s it. So far as we know, that’s every surviving story written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. If you find one that isn’t listed here, we’d be very eager to see it. In case you missed the link earlier, you can find these at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive. And until next time: