Manipulative Reproductive Suppression
Believe it or not, it's worse than it sounds
This is a free post made possible by paid subscribers.
Writing is my profession and calling. If you find value in my work, please consider becoming a subscriber to support it.
Already subscribed but want to lend additional patronage? Prefer not to subscribe, but want to offer one-time support? You can leave a tip to keep this project going by clicking below:
Thank you for reading, and for your support!
This week, I listened to the most important podcast I think I’ve ever heard.
I know, I know, that’s a big claim.
But here’s the thing: I mentioned in my recent post, “Men Don’t Need Sex,” that the escalating Battle of the Sexes is one of THE fundamental issues facing our civilization these days, and nothing less than the future of the species is at stake.
But this podcast took my understanding of what’s really going on from symptomatic issues around the edges to core causality.
The podcast name is Calmversations, and the guest was an Australian psychological researcher named Dr. Dani Sulikowksi.
Dr. Sulikowski discussed a well-known (at least in the evolutionary psychology community) phenomenon known as “Female Intrasexual Competition,” and how this is playing out on a society-wide scale in the form of something she terms “Manipulative Reproductive Suppression.”
But let’s take this one step at a time.
To give you an idea of the basics of both male and female intrasexual competition, let’s look to an entirely different source: the first chapter of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. That chapter, entitled, “Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back,” is an examination of the dominance hierarchy that controls animal mating behaviors — including those of humans — through the specific lens of Lobsters, whose simple nervous systems have made scientific study much easier than higher-order creatures. After some preliminary discussion of the behaviors of male lobsters who win or lose higher places in the dominance hierarchy of their crustacean kind, he talks about the order that is established within that hierarchy, and how females of the species respond:
[I]t doesn’t take that long before lobsters, testing each other out, learn who can be messed with and who should be given a wide berth—and once they have learned, the resultant hierarchy is exceedingly stable. All a victor needs to do, once he has won, is to wiggle his antennae in a threatening manner, and a previous opponent will vanish in a puff of sand before him. A weaker lobster will quit trying, accept his lowly status, and keep his legs attached to his body. The top lobster, by contrast—occupying the best shelter, getting some good rest, finishing a good meal—parades his dominance around his territory, rousting subordinate lobsters from their shelters at night, just to remind them who’s their daddy.
All the Girls
The female lobsters (who also fight hard for territory during the explicitly maternal stages of their existence) identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him. This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation. It’s also one used by females of many different species, including humans. Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of identifying the best man, the females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy. They let the males fight it out and peel their paramours from the top. This is very much what happens with stock-market pricing, where the value of any particular enterprise is determined through the competition of all.
[…]
Once the Beast has been successfully charmed, the successful female (lobster) will disrobe, shedding her shell, making herself dangerously soft, vulnerable, and ready to mate. At the right moment, the male, now converted into a careful lover, deposits a packet of sperm into the appropriate receptacle. Afterward, the female hangs around, and hardens up for a couple of weeks (another phenomenon not entirely unknown among human beings). At her leisure, she returns to her own domicile, laden with fertilized eggs. At this point another female will attempt the same thing—and so on. The dominant male, with his upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls. It is exponentially more worthwhile to be successful, if you are a lobster, and male.
When it comes to human females, Peterson asserts:
If you’re female, you have access to many high-quality suitors: tall, strong and symmetrical; creative, reliable, honest and generous. And, like your dominant male counterpart, you will compete ferociously, even pitilessly, to maintain or improve your position in the equally competitive female mating hierarchy. Although you are less likely to use physical aggression to do so, there are many effective verbal tricks and strategies at your disposal, including the disparaging of opponents, and you may well be expert at their use.
And that brings us to the thesis of Dr. Sulikowski.
Because male fertility has no cap — a single male could impregnate a hundred or more females if he has access to them — male intrasexual competition tends to take a more direct form: we try to get bigger, stronger, faster, better, richer, etc. We see, in the modern era, how this plays out — on the dating app Hinge, the top 1% of men get 16% of all the “likes”; but to zoom out a bit, it’s claimed that the top 10% of men get 58% of “likes,” while the bottom 50% get only 4.3%!
But according to Sulikowski, female intrasexual competition, as Peterson alluded to above, has a different core strategy: sabotage.
The reason for this is because female fertility is inherently capped because of the time and resources it takes to gestate and give birth to a child, plus the time it takes before this process can be repeated. So the chief means for a female to ensure that her genetic lineage wins the long game is to reduce the number of babies other women have through manipulative reproductive suppression.
In other words: women use psyops to increase the odds that their offspring are overrepresented in the gene pool. Often without even knowing it.
Sulikowski says that male intrasexual competition drives the growth of civilizations, but there appears to be a repeating theme across history: at some point in any given civilization’s ascendancy, there is a tipping point, where female intrasexual competition (FIS) takes over as the dominant force, and when this happens, the psyops cause real damage.
And, according to Sulikowski, looking across the span of history, every time this happens, it marks the decline and collapse of the civilization where it’s taking place.
We all feel this, I think, on an innate level. But we don’t know why everything is getting worse, and why it feels so universal and systemic.
But Sulikowski identifies specific manifestations. She lays the blame for things like “woke” ideology, “me too,” abortion rights, transgenderism, the advocacy for career-before-baby advice, and the promotion of child-free lifestyles at the feet of FIS.
She even says that so-called “toxic masculinity” is not so much an attack on men (though it does hurt them) as an attack on the kind of strong men women actually want as fit genetic mates for the purposes of creating offspring.
And because feminist capture of institutions — academia, hospitals, government programs — is widespread, reproductive suppression propaganda has extremely effective organs of dissemination throughout the culture.
I fed ChatGPT to the transcript of the podcast and asked it to identify key themes, and this is what it came up with:
Wokeness = evolutionary sabotage strategy rather than purely ideology.
Civilizational decline follows predictable sex-dynamics cycles.
Female competition shifts from attraction → suppression once wealth eliminates survival advantage.
Modern institutions reinforce suppression, accelerating collapse.
Religion & traditional marriage were mechanisms that historically counteracted this.
Collapse may be cyclical and inevitable — but awareness allows cultural resistance.
The richness of this material lies in the discussion and in Sulikowski’s passion for the topic, and any further summary from me will pale in comparison. I cannot recommend this highly enough if you want to get past all the peripheral arguments and identify root causes for much of the civilizational disintegration we are witnessing today:
If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip to support this and future pieces like it.
No one here seems to have addressed the subject of intra-sexual competition tactics among women.
Fertility and male-female relations are certainly worthy topics. But I was stricken by recognition of what I’ve experienced and observed. Yes, this is real, and vicious in a way that men can’t readily understand. Women too will deny it. If you know one who’ll discuss it, listen.
Your haircut looks great (marine cut on a 20-something woman.)
Your back would feel better if you had breast-reduction surgery. (This was possibly true but no regard to risks/actual outcomes was given. Still better in my opinion to teach posture, core strengthening exercises, and better bra-buying options)
So many more examples, and not recent ones.
Women can grow to be wary of advice from friends, even mothers, sisters, etc. And friendships with men may distort things too, but it does start with female-female influences. Thank you for highlighting this. Lord, have mercy.
The thing is, there is no reason to believe that having fertility above the replacement level is the default setting that can only be "ruined" by suppressive ideology like feminism.
I think the opposite is true - in a state of anomic nihilism, a childfree society with below-replacement fertility is the norm and what will bring it up is an ideology (or culture, or religion, or emerging societal standard or even tribal narrative) that will boost it above replacement level.
The argument against my position is that even in the absence of cultural phenomena, the sex drive exists. That is true, but a sex drive is a myopic and reptilian thing. It is the sex drive, not the "produce a functional family while having children" drive. Unless the culture forms the sex drive in the appropriate way, you can fulfill it with casual relationships, masturbation, non-reproductive marriages, homosexual behavior or whatever stimulates the appropriate organs. The only thing keeping these non-productive forms of sexuality at bay is a cultural command that they are inappropriate.
Once the cultural repression goes, everything is fair game. A minority will have a personality that will lead them to forming a reproductive marriage. Meanwhile the majority will deviate. This will happen not because any single deviant temptation is so strong, but because in a society like ours, there is a temptation for every temperament. The sex addicts will have causal sex, the misanthropes will engage in porn and masturbation (so they don't have to deal with other people), the career-obsessed will marry but not have children.
This is the outcome of leaving things free. In such a state, below-replacement fertility rate is the obvious outcome. No additional repression (via anti-masculinism, feminism etc.) is even needed - although where it exists, it probably suppresses birth rates even more.