Manipulative Reproductive Suppression
Believe it or not, it's worse than it sounds
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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:
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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.
so what's the fix to this? does it include still allowing women to be educated, pursue their own interests alongside family and children, and be enfranchised? What always gets me about these kinds of massive generalizations about all women is that it provides an easy 'key' that boils down to a basic assumption ("Women, without even knowing it, want other women to have less children in order to be more sexually dominant"). That seems pretty easy compared with the more challenging idea that perhaps multiple ideas are true at the same time
1) women still desire longterm commitments and children (basic evolutionary biology),
2) traditional structures were, in fact, not ideal for women ((lack of education, being treated as property, no enfranchisement) - you as someone who experienced infantilization at the hands of a traditional religious institution, can perhaps relate to this) even if they prioritized reproduction- women thriving is not simply the same thing as women having children, though they are related,
3) women accessed higher education for the first time in the early to mid-twentieth century- incredibly recently - so workplaces are still largely geared towards able-bodied neurotypical men (i don't mean this in any identity politics kind of way and am not implying a value judgement, just as literal descriptors- please take them as such) and male reproduction. Some of the effects of this obvious history in workplaces are that: independence is one of the highest values, there is little place for taking time off or flexible scheduling (this is slowly changing, even if most office jobs could fairly easily be done from home or more flexibly), reproduction (understood only but wrongly as having sex) takes no time and effort in comparison to work (although it should), and work is valued as the primary source of meaning in one's life. All of these factors (and probably others I am not thinking of) make it difficult for women to be 'in the world' and also have children, or as many children as in the past. Not to mention the lack of community supports, the skyrocketing cost of education, and the skyrocketing cost of housing (and everything else). And women don't want to relinquish access to higher education, nor should they.
4) the framing of 'the battle of the sexes' as an adversarial relationship between women and men, rather than a deeper understanding that men and women's deepest desires are to love each other as equals, reduces the conflict to a war metaphor where peace will only be reached when one side somehow dominates or subdues the other and 'wins'. I would argue that this is an unhelpful framing- 'winning' would look like dealing with the complex reality that women AND MEN want children and families BUT ALSO women still wish for higher education and a life including the home but also outside the home (surely, you can see this in your own wife), AND that such a life requires different societal priorities than we currently have (embracing dependence and interdependence as normal rather than shameful, a reduction in incredibly high costs for basic needs such as education, housing and health care, the elimination of absurd levels of debt as normal in our economy (which severely impedes the ability to have children), flexibility and generous parental leave for both men and women at work, a focus on outcomes rather than time-in-office in workplaces, a public acknowledgement that both men and women need help, resources and support in order to value their families as much as (though it should be more than) their work). Such accommodations would benefit everyone, but in their absence, it is not surprising that women are finding it difficult to have as many children as in the past (though i would argue there is no 'non-feminist' golden age to return to -just different problems, equally severe).
I am not proposing a political system or anything like that, but I am trying to re-ground the conversation outside of broad generalizations and assumptions about some kind of unconscious sinister nature in women and in the extremely obvious and observable social constraints that everyone (not just women) is living under right now. We are in this together, and we are not each other's enemies, even though that might be an easy way to make sense of the world. I could just as easily make an unsubstantiated assertion that men's equation of sex with domination and social hierarchy has led to pointlessly competitive institutional structures in every domain of life that are focused so much on finding the best, richest, strongest and brightest, that everyone else gets thrown to the wayside. Full disclosure: I don't actually believe that; a huge generalization about the nature of all men (just like all women) reveals as much as it conceals.
Broad black-and-white 'secret key' assertions may feel like a big insight that decodes the whole world but 1) what assumptions back them up and do those hold up? and 2) what is the outcome being implied or proposed by the assertion- what ought you to DO on the basis of it? I find these questions helpful in evaluating the worth of such assertions - they may be similarly helpful to you, or not.