This episode is also on Bilibili too.
In this episode, I’m continuing to unpack the highlights of the new English-language psychology book When Men Behave Badly.
Last time, I said that “sperm are numerous and cheap, while eggs are few and precious” probably explains 80 to 90 percent of the conflicts between human men and women. Today, let’s unpack that idea. We’ll start with
three stages—men and women testing each other, starting to date, and then getting married—and give one example of a conflict between the sexes for each stage:
the ordinary-but-confident man vs. the ordinary-but-confident woman in the testing stage;
the fast man vs. the slow woman in the dating stage;
the unfaithful man vs. the unfaithful woman in the marriage stage.
A moment ago, comedian Yang Li said, “Why do men look so utterly ordinary, yet feel so confident?” Why? The ordinary men who weren’t confident may once have existed, but they’ve all gone extinct. The world is just that cruel: if an ordinary man isn’t confident, he’s doomed to leave no descendants.
Remember “male competition” from last time? Eggs are few and precious, so once the exceptional, dominant men monopolize women’s reproductive potential, ordinary men can easily end up single—and then leave no descendants. So men generally evolved a psychological coping mechanism: if the chance to leave offspring is extremely rare, then whenever an opportunity appears, you have to seize it as hard as possible. And how do you seize it? The solution is brutally simple: men evolved an unrealistic level of confidence. They often unconsciously mistake a woman’s friendliness and politeness for flirting, for genuine interest, for the long-awaited realization that they are, in fact, incredibly handsome.
An American supermarket chain once introduced a service-improvement plan that required cashiers to make eye contact with customers and smile at them. Once the rule took effect, sexual harassment of female cashiers by male customers shot straight up. Some male customers asked female cashiers out, asked them for sex, and some cashiers were even stalked by male customers. Eventually, the supermarket had to cancel the eye-contact rule—and sexual-harassment incidents dropped sharply.
That’s the male tendency to overestimate sexual opportunities at work. A woman’s friendly look or polite smile usually carries no further meaning, but men often interpret it as: “Was she winking at me? Is she into me?” Women, by contrast, are more cautious about sexual intentions, so they instinctively underestimate men’s sexual interest. Both sexes misread the other person’s intentions, but in exactly opposite directions. And that’s where the conflict comes from. You can see the shadow of this bias behind many cases of sexual harassment.
Of course, men’s exaggerated confidence is detached from reality most of the time, and it does cause women plenty of trouble. But over the course of evolution, this blind confidence may well have helped our male ancestors. Even if 99 out of 100 women weren’t actually interested, that one genuine opportunity could still allow a male ancestor to pass on his genes. The men of today are descended from those ordinary, blindly confident men.
Men are ordinary but confident—but what about women? Women also tend to be ordinary but confident; the causes and the way it shows up are just a little different. Because of the exaggerated confidence I just described, men often overestimate their attractiveness in women’s eyes. A 5-out-of-10 man often thinks a 7-out-of-10 woman is a reasonable match for him. So when a 5-out-of-10 man makes a move on a 7-out-of-10 woman, she may well experience it as harassment. But there’s an even more brutal fact: even if the man himself were a 7, he might still be deemed unacceptable by that woman, because women are much stricter in evaluating men. One study analyzed data from an online dating site and found that most male users considered many of the women on the site attractive, while most female users found attractive only the men in the top 20 percent overall.
One side thinks, “What is it about me that makes me not good enough for you?” while the other thinks, “Where did you get the confidence to think you’re good enough for me?” Mutual complaints and conflict are therefore almost inevitable.
The unrealistic part of an ordinary-but-confident man is that he thinks women rated anywhere from 1 to 10 should be interested in him. The unrealistic part of an ordinary-but-confident woman is that she is interested only in men rated 8 to 10, while believing that men rated 8 to 10 should be interested in her.
So really, most men and women are equally ordinary—and equally confident.
Now let’s move on to the next stage. Even though they often looked down on each other, somehow a man and a woman still started dating and became a couple. At that point, the conflict between the ordinary-but-confident man and woman often turns into a conflict between the fast man and the slow woman.
You’ve probably heard of PUA—pickup artistry. Pickup artistry is a set of scripts and psychological tactics supposedly developed by “pickup artists” to quickly break through the defenses of women they’ve just met, with the goal of getting them into bed. Some people even run paid training courses teaching this stuff.
PUA includes one particular technique. Some PUA instructors advise students to keep taking a woman they’ve just met from place to place throughout one evening—to seven different places in a single night. Supposedly, this can greatly shorten the time it takes her to agree to have sex.
What’s the principle behind this technique?
The reason this lousy PUA technique exists is that it rests on a major premise: once men and women start dating, they differ enormously in how long it should take after meeting before sex can happen. This is a classic conflict between the sexes during the courtship stage.
Men are usually “fast men.” Most of them feel that sex can happen not long after meeting. Women, by contrast, are usually “slow women”: their permission for sex tends to come later.
Why does this fast-man, slow-woman phenomenon exist? Because beneath men’s blind confidence is really anxiety about missing a sexual opportunity. With that anxiety in the background, men are always more “desperate to get on with it” sexually than women. When a sexual opportunity appears, they want to lock it down and cash it in quickly, before complications arise. And that’s how men became fast men.
On the other hand, “eggs are few and precious.” Women have a limited number of offspring, so they want to make sure each one has the best possible chance of surviving. They need to observe more, take things slowly, and choose carefully, until they’re sure the man in front of them is an excellent enough “father of their children.” Only then will they agree to let him become the father of their children. And that’s how women became slow women.
Romance is really about “roaming” and “slowing down”: men want to roam, women want to go slow. There’s another conflict right there.
And that’s how the PUA technique mentioned at the beginning came about. Why take a woman to seven different places in one night? Because it seems to create a psychological illusion: she may feel that the two of them have known each other longer than they actually have, as if she’d already been seeing this man for a long time. That gets around the slow woman’s psychological defenses.
That’s the principle behind changing locations seven times in one night. Pretty sinister, right? But does it work? Not really—it’s completely useless. Most women can spot such a calculated maneuver instantly. After all, the “take it slow” mindset is one of the deepest-rooted elements of female sexual psychology. It’s not that easy to break through.
Okay, so next, the fast men and slow women finally get their rhythms synchronized, the relationship moves forward, and they walk down the aisle. At that point, the core conflict shifts once again, becoming a conflict between unfaithful men and unfaithful women.
“You unfaithful man.” That’s the classic line the heroine delivers in a trashy romance drama or novel when she discovers that the hero has cheated. Being unfaithful can mean that a man has betrayed the woman’s devoted love, or that he has betrayed the devotion he once felt for her. But whichever meaning you choose, the label “unfaithful man” is actually a little strange. In these melodramatic stories, men are often unfaithful in both heart and body: they fall for another woman and sleep with her. So why does the original partner accuse the man only of betraying his heart? He betrayed his body too, didn’t he?
Again, it’s because sperm are numerous and cheap. If they’re numerous and cheap, then a man’s physical contribution is, in principle, not particularly valuable. Men do have scarce and valuable things—but that isn’t their physiological reproductive potential. It’s the resources they control: the energy, money, and determination they invest in raising children. Those resources are governed by a man’s intentions. It’s his inner choice that determines where those resources go. That’s why, when a man betrays a woman psychologically and physically at the same time, what she cares about more is the psychological betrayal.
On the other side, the situation is reversed. Eggs are few and precious, so the scarcest thing women possess is precisely their physiological reproductive potential. That’s why men care more about a woman’s physical betrayal than about psychological infidelity.
Back in the 1980s, Fei Xiang was wildly popular across China—one hundred times more popular than any heartthrob today. At one outdoor concert, it started pouring rain, and many young women in the audience screamed for Fei Xiang in the downpour. They all had umbrellas over their heads, held by the boyfriends standing beside them. Those men watched their girlfriends scream for another man and remained perfectly calm. When one of my psychology teachers told this story back then, she sighed, “The mindset of those boyfriends holding the umbrellas must have been seriously warped.” Now, with the perspective of evolutionary psychology, I can tell her: not warped at all. The girl beside you was merely at Fei Xiang’s concert, not in Fei Xiang’s bed—so what was there to get nervous about?
Both men and women experience sexual jealousy, but they focus on different things. Women worry that men will become unfaithful men; they worry about emotional infidelity. Men worry that women will become unfaithful women; they worry about physical infidelity. Many experiments have already confirmed this conclusion.
Interestingly, even without a third party, this pattern of sexual jealousy seeps into a couple’s everyday life. When Men Behave Badly mentions the following phenomenon:
Couples often have this kind of conflict over spending. After basic expenses are covered, husbands tend to spend the money left over on entertainment systems, new tech devices, and luxury cars. Wives, meanwhile, tend to spend it on designer clothes and cosmetics. Can you see what’s really going on behind these two preferences?
A husband’s spending is meant to show other people that he has plenty of resources at his disposal, while a wife’s spending is meant to enhance her beauty and show other people her reproductive potential (beauty is one signal of reproductive potential). So, isn’t that interesting? Resources can raise a man’s value in the mate market, while beauty can raise a woman’s value in the mate market. But a family’s wealth is finite: when one person’s value goes up, the other person is relatively worse off. So what will the other person think? You dress yourself up this beautifully—what are you trying to do? You buy a luxury car—what are you trying to do? You see, even without a third party entering the picture, the conflict between the unfaithful man and the unfaithful woman has already surfaced because of how family resources are allocated.
All right, that’s where I’ll leave the stories of the ordinary-but-confident man, the ordinary-but-confident woman, the fast man and the slow woman, and the unfaithful man and the unfaithful woman. *When Men Behave Badly* actually covers many much heavier topics, including men abusing women and rape. But I won’t discuss those parts on this program—not because I’m trying to gloss over the serious stuff, but because I don’t think those sections are written very well. For the most part, they just repeat some common knowledge. Maybe that’s simply going to be the style of this program when I talk about books in the future. I don’t try to cover everything, and I don’t do those so-called book breakdowns. I don’t aim to take a book from beginning to end. I just chat with everyone about the moments in a book that make my eyes light up or make me want to applaud—and those flashes of insight and highlights don’t necessarily have to be the book’s most central content.
If you enjoy my program, please follow, like, save, and comment. I’ll keep updating this channel with all kinds of psychology knowledge, both respectable and decidedly less respectable. I’m Zhichao Wei. See you next time.
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