The Brutal Tactics of Female Sexual Competition - Dr Dani Sulikowski - #1064

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How do you describe your area of research focus?

**Dani Sulikowski** (0:05)
So my research focus is the evolutionary psychology of human behavior. And in the last few years in particular, I've really narrowed that focus down a bit to look at female intersexual competition, which is just a big fancy word for how women compete with each other to see who gets the largest share of the population's reproductive success.

**Chris Williamson** (0:28)
Okay. What is it trying to achieve? Fundamentally, what does female intersexual competition try to do?

**Dani Sulikowski** (0:35)
So the currency of evolution is reproductive success. The genes that promote reproductive success increase in frequency in the population. And so whatever mechanisms and behaviors they produce will also increase in frequency. So female intersexual competition is the suite of behaviors that have evolved to maximize an individual's relative reproductive success, not absolutely productive success. And that's a pretty important point. So you don't need to have as many babies as it's humanly possible to have to win the evolutionary game. What you do need to do is reproduce at a greater rate than the average reproductive rate for your population. And if that continues to happen in your lineage generation after generation, then you increase your representation in that population and you win the evolutionary game. So it's relative reproductive success that matters. So you can win by increasing your own reproductive success or attempting to inhibit the reproductive success of rivals. Both of those will increase your net reproductive success.

**Chris Williamson** (1:41)
Okay. So you can put your foot on the gas of how many surviving children you have, or you can try to put your foot on the brake of how many surviving children other women have.

**Dani Sulikowski** (1:53)
Exactly.

**Chris Williamson** (1:54)
Okay. This doesn't paint women in a particularly flattering light.
How conscious is this? Is it all women?

**Dani Sulikowski** (2:06)
Oh, excellent. You've hit on my least favorite question straight away. How conscious is this?

**Chris Williamson** (2:12)
Fuck me. Okay. Thanks, Dani.

**Dani Sulikowski** (2:14)
No, that's okay. No, that's fantastic. It's the question I get the most often and you think I would have invested some time in coming up with a better answer. I try to answer it a little bit differently each time in the hope that it's a more satisfactory answer.
How conscious people are, unclear. Unclear, it varies from person to person and it probably doesn't really matter very much. So understanding what, very briefly, understanding what consciousness is and for is a really difficult question and there's no consensus. How it operates with respect to sort of evolved behavioral tendencies is it develops kind of post hoc justification for what you've done and why you've done. In fact, that's sort of what consciousness does with all behaviors really. You ask people why they've done something, they don't know. We can do an experiment where we manipulate the information that people get and they don't know we've manipulated that. Then we ask them why they made their decision and they just make something up and they don't know they've made something up. People generally don't know why they're doing what they're doing. The majority of people, not just women, but people generally really don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They don't know why they find this particular person attractive. They don't know it's because the shape of their face signals they have particular levels of testosterone or oestrogen that contribute to fertility and particular behavior in really nice adaptive ways. They just look at someone and go, oh, he's hot, she's nice, but they don't have to understand why. Women and men, because intersexual competition applies to men as well, it's just a completely different ballgame when it comes to men. They don't have to understand that the consequences of their behavior is inhibiting the reproductive success of other women. They just have to be compelled to behave that way. So it doesn't necessitate that women be overtly aware of some nastiness in the behavior. Having said that though, women are definitely overtly aware of much nastiness in their behavior, as most women will attest to. Most women have been the recipients at some point over another of the bullying behavior from other nasty women. So women certainly have the capacity to be absolutely directly overtly and knowingly nasty and awful to each other. I mean, that's a given. So maybe they're sometimes conscious of the consequences of what they're doing. Sometimes, if you look at it through a feminist lens, this is something else that I've talked about a little bit. Women are very conscious of what they're doing in terms of how the ideologies affect the reproductive success of other women, but they think that's a good thing. They think motherhood is a form of oppression and marriage is a form of subjugation. If you can free women from those things, this is obviously certain branches of feminism, not necessarily all. But if you can free women from those things, well, that's a great thing. They can be well aware that this is reproductively inhibiting ideology without necessarily thinking that they've been mean or nasty or whatever by doing it.