Patrice Mauricard

@SteveStuWill Effect sizes are small for many of these findings. The paper linking narcissism and Machiavellianism to gullibility used a psych student sample that was ~80% female & didn't control for sex or cognitive ability. Those are pretty relevant confounds here. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid…

“The single strongest personality predictor [of conspiracy thinking] is narcissism. Narcissists are particularly prone to conspiracy theories because they have a strong need for uniqueness, are prone to paranoia, and can also be remarkably gullible.” stevestewartwilliams.com/p/12-things-ev…

@MackenMurphy @Rich_Cooper Women’s sexual motivation shows no decline over time when they're with a man who's more educated, while it drops off if he’s equally or less educated. This fits the hypergamy model. Women would rather be with a guy they can look up to than a guy who is on or below their level.

@Rich_Cooper Lol. I don’t have a theory, that’s why I’m asking my followers.

I should know this: Is there a standard evo psych explanation for why women’s sexual desire declines faster than men’s within monogamous pairbonds? 🤔 My intuition is that if it were the other way around, that would accord better with sexual strategies theory.

@PBaboins @RobinBlucher @brianatheroux You're 100% correct. That said, OP's argument isn't entirely dependent on that chart. Men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) in women, and women's WHR reaches its lowest point in their mid-to-late teens. Men also tend to prefer very youthful female faces.

@RobinBlucher @brianatheroux That graph seems to have been completely made up. It isn't in the cited source. I haven't been able to find it anywhere

Men love posting the OkCupid chart as a gotcha… see, men age, but they still want 20 yo, we’re just wired this way. What they leave out is that OkCupid’s age slider only went down to ~20. The curve bottoms out there because it has nowhere lower to go. Cap the floor, get a floor effect. That’s not a preference, that’s a methodology artifact. When the floor comes off (like in the Hall/Hirschman/Oliver plethysmograph data) the curve shifts dramatically younger. Peak around 14. But went lower. For clarity, the y-axis of this graph represents the percentage of females in that age group rated as sexually attractive. So, roughly 9 in every 10 females aged 13-16 are seen as sexually attractive by adult men. Thats scary. That doesn’t mean men all are predators. It means raw physiological response and long term mate selection are not the same system. Humans have plenty of evolved impulses society places limits on because acting on every impulse would be destructive. But that’s also telling for women. Women care that some men are physiologically responsive to children. Many were sexualized, pursued, manipulated, or exploited by much older men while underage. Reacting negatively to that isn’t irrational or because they are afraid of competition (lol). It’s normal motherly protective instincts kicking in. The “it’s about fertility” argument also falls apart the moment you look at the peak. A 14 yo is not biologically optimized for pregnancy simply because puberty occurred. Teen pregnancy carries significantly higher physical risk and worse maternal outcomes than adult pregnancy. So reducing all male attraction to “fertility detection” is biologically simplistic. There is obviously something more going on that people are noticing and reacting to. Most of us agree men and women are attracted to markers associated with fertility and vitality. That’s normal. But at some point those fertility markers are clearly being surpassed and the rationale starts becoming a post hoc justification for something potentially harmful. And people know that intuitively. Which is why the conversation creates such visceral discomfort in the first place. The irony is that women prefer youth and physical vitality too once you strip provisioning and resources out of the equation. Men aren’t unique there. The chart shows a difference in age selection based on what women know about men in certain age brackets and their ability to provide security/safety—not necessarily what women find most physically attractive in a vacuum. And another thing… why are we acting like men constantly publicly announcing they’re attracted only to a 20 yo is somehow irrelevant to women? If you want to get married, that messaging is not what you want to loud speaker. Why would a woman willingly sign up for a relationship with a man openly telling her he will lose attraction to her once she crosses some arbitrary age threshold and no longer retains childlike qualities? We all age. That is objectively a terrible deal for all women. Being attracted to youth and vitality is one thing. Being fixated on adolescent traits and extreme youth is another. Honestly, this discourse may function as a useful screening mechanism. Men loudly broadcasting this worldview are essentially removing themselves from the long term dating pool for many psychologically healthy women. The chart is basically a Rorschach test. What people project onto it says more than the data itself does.

@GAptei @brianatheroux Every study on this topic found that teen girls have lower C-section risk than adult women. This holds true even for very young adolescents (ages 11–14) due to superior myometrial function and greater connective tissue elasticity. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25935776/

@PMauricard @brianatheroux Not at all, for example C section is due to lack of pelvic glidder développement, and the rest to immune/hormonal imbalance. Poor adult women doesn't have such hight risks.

@GAptei @brianatheroux Respectfully, no one denies teens face higher overall risk (except for C-sections). But this is driven by pre-existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities + less prenatal care, not young age per se. Studies controlling for these factors often find no increased risk vs adult women.

@PMauricard @brianatheroux As a medstudent who worked in hospitals I can ensure you teen's pregnancy are at much higher risks (of C-section, pre eclampsia, low birth weight, early delivery...)

@Parasocialist_K @sentientist In hunter-gatherer societies, 'high-resource' men are those with exceptional hunting skills. Among the Hadza, for instance, superior hunters enjoy greater reproductive success, higher mate value, and tend to marry younger wives. scispace.com/pdf/mate-prefe…

@sentientist In hunter gatherer societies, resources are shared across the whole band, not by small family units. There are no "high resource" men. To call the preference for greater resources "evolved" is absurd. It is clearly a social adaptation, far too recent to be biological.

I wouldn't call something a "myth" if women's preferences for greater resources in men is nearly a human universal and is also seen in wealthy women in real life. Something isn't a myth if the only way you can get women to say they don't prefer resources is to ask them put themselves in Stamola, an imaginary place (that could probably never exist) where women make 2x more than men.

@Experi_ment626 @ElenaBoboc52984 @PBaboins @brianatheroux That paper was written by a woman. In the US, girls who get pregnant typically face pre-existing vulnerabilities like poverty, malnutrition, and minority status, factors also associated with pregnancy complications in adult women. About 65-70% of them are non-White.

@PMauricard @ElenaBoboc52984 @PBaboins @brianatheroux Do you think anyone buys 99% of research done by p3do men to justify their p3do feeling through science? In all of mine and every other woman doctor's careers that i have seen all pregnancies under the age range that you claim to be the perfect one go to sh.t one way or another.

@KnJFBAllDay @brianatheroux Not quite. Men didn’t evolve to promiscuously 'spread seed.' Since human infants need paternal investment, pair-bonding has always been the norm. Men maximize their reproductive success by choosing young women/girls with high fertility & a long window of reproductive potential.

@brianatheroux Correct. And in terms of biology, fertility is women's concern, not men's. They're built to spread seed, regardless.

@RobSPierreduMex @RealPaulElam Actually, she's wrong on this. Even for high-status professional women, marriage in prime reproductive years (25-44) has dropped from 71% to 56%, and childbearing/fertility is also lower, both overall & conditional on being married. ifstudies.org/blog/low-girlb…

@RealPaulElam She's right tho.

Says the pickme who supported men's rights till they wouldn't let her rearrange the furniture, and then went all mean girl, lol.

@ElenaBoboc52984 @PBaboins @brianatheroux There are numerous confounding factors, such as race, poverty, and drug use, that the WHO does not control for Looking at the research as a whole, there is no consensus that teenage pregnancy is harmful, and many studies provide contradictory findings.

@PBaboins @brianatheroux The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies teenage pregnancy as a major health risk, noting that complications related to pregnancy and childbirth are among the leading causes of death for girls aged 15 to 19 globally who.int/news-room/fact…

@ElenaBoboc52984 @PBaboins @brianatheroux Very early pregnancy is risky, but for older teens, the risks are minimal. Even in a society with no modern medicine and later menarche than in the US, there’s no evolutionary fitness benefit for girls to delay pregnancy beyond roughly age 14-15. link.springer.com/chapter/10.100…

@PBaboins @brianatheroux Girls in the 10–14 age group face a higher risk of eclampsia, anemia, systemic infections, and cephalopelvic disproportion (because their bodies are not yet fully physically developed for childbirth)

@neetcate @PBaboins @brianatheroux These findings are confounded by environmental & genetic factors. Pregnant teens are much more likely to be poor, non-White, smokers, drinkers, or malnourished beforehand—all independent risk factors for pregnancy complications regardless of maternal age.

@PBaboins @brianatheroux insane cope. neonatal disorders kills more people worldwide than aids, homicide and suicide combined. stop promoting child pregnancy.

@andtwofortea @medi0 @evolvjj @jakozloski @KeeperAI The 'fear-mongering' is actually somewhat justified; while 30 isn't too late for most women to have a child, it is for some. Only 1–3% of women are permanently infertile (sterile) in their early 20s, but that figure climbs to 10% by age 30. academic.oup.com/humupd/article…

@medi0 @evolvjj @jakozloski @KeeperAI Jane Austen’s mother had her at 36 and had one more child before she said “Come on, George, separate bedrooms, the births were fine but we cannot afford nine children.” This sort of thing has always been more common than the fearmongering about women turning barren at 29.

Male age preferences for a wife track his own age across the lifespan, not a fixed younger target. Under 32, his ideal range extends a couple years above his own age. Past 32, the ideal shifts to his own age or younger. His acceptable range widens further younger as he ages. Even at 45, women in their mid-20s remain in his acceptable range. The “all men want a 20-year-old” claim may be true for casual preferences but it’s not what most men look for in a wife. (Keeper data)

@andtwofortea @medi0 @evolvjj @jakozloski @KeeperAI It’s not just about pregnancy complication risk; many women simply cannot get pregnant anymore at that age. By age 38, 30% of women are already sterile, rising to 80% by age 45. Most women in their late 30s are subfertile, making it very hard for them to conceive.

@medi0 @evolvjj @jakozloski @KeeperAI Yes, and the seriousness of “geriatric pregnancies” continues to diminish with medical advances. If you’re worried about birth defects or neuro issues, you should probably lecture the “I can have kids any time I want haha empty egg carton,” men whose sperm poses risks first.

@tmamut @SteveStuWill Cyntoia Brown only served 15 years before Gov. Bill Haslam granted her clemency in 2019. Let’s be real: if a man had committed a similar crime, he’d still be behind bars with a much longer sentence.

@tmamut @SteveStuWill That meme is deeply misleading. Turner sexually assaulted an unconscious woman w/o penetrating or harming her. Cyntoia Brown shot & killed an innocent man who had paid her for sex, then proceeded to steal his wallet, guns, & truck. He wasn't a 'rapist'; he was a client of hers.

"Offenders who killed men received shorter sentences than those who killed women. As the table shows, the average sentence when the victim was male was 17.5 years, compared with 22.4 years when the victim was female." stevestewartwilliams.com/p/bias-in-the-…

@LOTrolhello @wil_da_beast630 This stems from bad cultural incentives, not biology—and it's rare today. Monogamy restricts the supply of high-status grooms; in dowry cultures, parents traditionally bid for these matches to achieve hypergamy, making daughters unaffordable for many & driving infanticide.

@wil_da_beast630 30% of girls will have been exposed, drowned, or buried before they get live a single day. Very common in India, China, Africa, and even Europe.

At baseline, yeah. Historically, the bottom 30% of men just died, and many people still look at them in this context. This explains "incel rage." Bottom-30% WOMEN aren't exactly treated like Queens either ("Fries in the bag;" "Bend her over and don't think too much - I'd do."). But being alive and lightly teased is better than trying to shove your own guts back in on a battle-field. Some quick thoughts.

@kkgg9540 @wil_da_beast630 Actually, the authors of the study tested that. Neither age nor the presence/absence of children explained the results. The decline in women's desire was linked to relationship duration itself.

@PMauricard @wil_da_beast630 This isn't about age, though This is about romance and the relationship As women desire are responsive rather than spontaneous, and as relationship goes on, kids enter into the picture and people "settle"

It's worth noting, re twitter's past-few-days topic, that this really isn't what the literature finds. Most healthy men are attracted to a range of women, FROM young but physically/sexually adult TO "MILFy." Women in their early 20s are seen as most attractive by everyone, but this was by .6 points (and they were seen as worse in bed). If you build up a stockpile of romantic, sexual, domestic, and financial memories with your husband, he isn't going to want to leave when you turn 30...or 40...or 50. Most male disgust with marriage traces very specifically to behavior - fading sex, lack of physical fitness (the average US woman is 5'4" and 170), constant argument - and not to appearance. I suspect the same is true for women, re modern men.